Of this pseudo-ballad, we might say, in Steve McCaffery’s words, “a read-
ing activates certain relational pathways, a ®ow of parts, and... a structural
‘infolding’ of the textual elements” (Supplement 11). In the ¤rst stanza, each
of the fourteen words functions paragrammatically. “Sapphire’s lyre” (the
play on Sappho places Mullen’s own blues singer in a rich poetic tradition),^26
“styles” (or is “styles” a noun, designating Sapphire’s lyric styles?), “plucked
eyebrows,” where “plucked” can also be a verb as can the “bow” in “bow lips.”
“Bow lips and legs” is a witty false parallel: it refers to being “bow-legged,”
but “bow lips” are the Cupid’s mouth, a lovely rounded form. Or do the “lips
and legs” bow down? Most important, “lyre styles” sounds like “life styles,”
and, lo and behold, the last line reads, “whose lives are lonely too.”
Now consider the role sound plays—the rhyming of “Sapphire’s”/“lyre”/
“styles”; the consonance of “lyre,” “lives”; the alliteration of “l”s in seven of
the fourteen words; the eye rhyme of “brows”/“bow.” We can hear “Sap-
phire” playing the blues in this poignant and droll love song. What’s more,
in the second stanza, the “lucid music” comes to incorporate the Southern
Black idiolect of “you must don’t like my peaches / there’s some left on the
tree.”^27 Individual morphemes create tension: “chewed up the juicy fruit” re-
fers to a common brand of chewing gum, but “chewed up” relates that “juicy
fruit” to those rejected peaches. Again, “you’ve had my thrills” is a brilliant
send-up of the expected “I’ve had my thrills / a reefer a tub of gin / don’t
mess with me I’m evil.” And “I’m in your sin,” with its allusion to the Bessie
Smith song “A Pig Foot and a Bottle of Gin,” undercuts self-recrimination
(e.g., “I’m full of sin”) by putting the blame squarely on the lover. Then
again, “you’ve had my thrills” can be read as, “you’ve had my best moments;
I’ve given it all to you!” Finally, the semantic and phonemic conjunction of
“clipped bird” and “eclipsed moon” plays on the standard romantic clichés
about love. Is the poet herself the “clipped bird”? Or is she getting rid of the
lover? The poem’s last line, “you ®utter invisible still” makes for a comic
rhyme with the “thrills” of line 9; it also echoes the image of the swans who
glide through the water “Unwearied still” in Yeats’s “Wild Swans at Coole.”
The substitution of “invisible” could hardly be more de®ating: if “you” (the
lover) has been reduced to no more than an invisible ®utter, it is surely time
to move on. And in the penultimate line, “drive” rhymes with the second
syllable of “survives,” the chiming of “drive”—“desire”—“survives” under-
scoring the poet’s case for survival.
“Despite random, arbitrary, even nonsensical elements,” Mullen has re-
marked of Muse & Drudge, “the poem... is saturated with the intention-
ality of the writer.” “I intend the poem to be meaningful,” she insists, “to
allow, or suggest, to open up, or insinuate possible meanings, even in those
170 Chapter 8