Saturday, August 21, 2010

The Stepladder Confesses Its Clatter

What if a word explodes into surf and, bashful as a bride, rides an ox to Alabama where the hatchets are buried and humanity is stunned by the oysters absorbed in a dream of water? What if density has a wildcat and lifts itself into supposition? What if the mouth in our tea begins to narrate the door? Or succeeds at mosaic? Or breeds cognition? Or detonates in the olives?

A pump is spillable. Eczema is opposite. So is Alaska.

Bouillon overstates its particularity. Radical conceptions of hunger recruit bags of gravity as if a weight declared itself horses and evolved into lightning. Kandinsky kicking a stool.

Lines of poetry create a galaxy of goats that deform the fence and withdraw into squares of androgynous headlight. Look what walking has done to the sidewalk. Each flower is a hiatus of hands. To cauterize opinion is to anthologize the cackling of witches. Let bacteria shine out of a book. Boil the plays of Shakespeare into jelly. Let a mountain twist itself into swans.

A mind can drift through a cloud and think itself a scent of French yelling at unpredictable temperatures. Virtuosity comes in cubes that freeze below the threshold of consciousness. Mass mirrors the density of words. Fingers grow into metaphor and hold the mind like a slice of pumpernickel. A door opens in my head and a phenomenon of spoons and camaraderie culminates in evocations of blood. I can feel a fat cloud of cats and dogs rain on a map of England. I can feel abstractions of sunlight tugging my sleeve. I can feel the confusion of gardens.

The idea of frost has not been sufficiently explored. The golden glue of the estuary demonstrates the idea of union. It all sticks together after the tide pulls back revealing an ear full of imagery and a tongue of mud languishing in wreckage.

I am not another fungus come to announce the wisdom of decay. I am simply a house of language offering shelter to the nebulas of reverie ballooning into furniture. Actual chairs. Actual tables. Actual actuaries. Actual dimes and initiations.

Meaning coheres when the daydreams collude in exhibitions of cork, and the stepladder confesses its clatter.

2 comments:

Steven Fama said...


    . . . a galaxy of goats . . .

            . . . a hiatus of hands . . .

. . . a scent of French . . .

                     . . .a phenomenon of spoons and camaraderie . . .

                            . . . a fat cloud of cats and dogs . . .

                        . . . an ear full of imagery . . . a tongue of mud . . .

               T
               H
               A
               N
               K
               S

               !

John Olson said...

You bet! I started reading Markson tonight. What fun! I'm in factoid heaven. With nary a plot in sight.