The Pilgrim Prince

by Evelyn Hooven (April 2021)

Alex, Alex Katz, 1970
 

You, Psychiatrist,
Your skis
And tennis courts
Our nightmares
And stammers—
Our wanting to choose
Waiting in secret
To be chosen:
This fragile animal
Ghostly or real
Was never the Princess . . .

You with your suntanned face
Exemplary fitness
Voice trained by tape
Refined by one-way mirrors
Expect us to call you Prince
Precursor of cure.
But the one whose home
Is thought or dream
Or quest—the Pilgrim Prince
Himself—never was you.

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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