Taurus


The wild bull’s
on his way, I do not
give myself too
easily.
The lasso-man
enters the scene
trying to grapple
with horns.

My father hammers
at the portals
of his mistress’s
womb; the bull
bellows across
the fraudulent
road.

My mother spins her
machine like
a solitary queen.
I merely join
with the spinning.


Questions and Answers

What inspired “Taurus”?

It’s a sort of confessional poem, the time of one’s early childhood, and the tension between a mother and father, and the father is seen in association with the bull: this image being echoic (my father actually dealt with a few cattle most of his life; my mother worked long hours on the sewing machine: I kept recreating them); but it’s far more than autobiographical. It’s symbolic, I feel.

What poetic techniques did you use in “Taurus”?

The American confessional poets—a movement—at the time in my writing of “Taurus” I was imbued with. Writers like Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath and others I kept reading—who believed that any subject, no matter how personal, was grist for the poetic mill. So the technique was based on direct expression of feelings… to bare every emotion, no matter how private. The image of Taurus, the bull, is like an objective correlative, too, to symbolize maybe hidden demons that’s around us, and our humanity too. The stanzas indicate the obvious divisions; but the white space between the stanzas has significance—time and space overall.


This poem “Taurus” originally appeared in Sources. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 76 (Spring 1978): 46-46.

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