Mallarmé Packs His Suitcase

Mallarmé packs his suitcase with flotsam and steam and the catechism of dice. There is no end to the horizon. Unlike the rain battering his window and hitting the ground in a chaos of spit and splatter. That will end, and become 200 frogs croaking in Monday drizzle.

Where is he going? What will he do when he gets there? Will he find pleasure in water? Will he find sufficient rope to tie the sky to the earth?

It is 12:58 p.m. I am anchored in front of a computer. The snow slides gently and smoothly to the ground, softening and homogenizing form in a uniformity of white. Mallarmé exists in a different space and time. But we are linked. By poetry. And an ocean of blood flowing around a complexity of muscle and bone. Which is one and the same thing.

Laugh at necessity. But don’t laugh at pewter. Swimming is difficult in an empty pool. Pain sparkles in the shadows.

I am a monk in a realm of improbability. I prefer to wear denim most of the time. I like to experiment with words. Glazes and equations. Formulas and morals. Mass times bikini equals paprika. The square root of accordion is yellow fever. Pump means nervous multiplied by taste.

The window smells like an airplane. But the color of innocence blossoms in sugar and the fire vomits sparks.

Birch excites my words. Birch is a perspective. And a shaking and a deepening. A horse flies through a sonnet. Indigo lives in a violin. Frankenstein stumbles through the forest. His clothes are rags. His eyes are flames of hot bright mustard.

Everything meaningful exists outside of time. Identity is most acute when it has no identity. Once I was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now I am Thomas Hobbes. And the world is a leviathan.

What shall we call this world? This place without regiment, or horticulture. Let’s call it a pink balloon at the bottom of a rockery. A man pumping gas on a Saturday night in Nebraska. Three women sitting in wheelchairs in front of a Christian science church. Medallions of pork on a juniper plate. A woman in a yellow bathrobe, fingernails ablaze with pink.

The galaxy oozes visibility. Japan emerges from the fog. Water drips from the leaves, soaks into the ground, and rises back up in the form of sap.

I stop to gather healing elixirs in a garden of handsprings. Do you accept my nudity? My alphabet of needs and butterflies? Consciousness coils around a sound and becomes a word. A stirring of coal dust attacks the syntax of science. If cynicism doesn’t work, use force. If force doesn’t work, use poetry. Space holds the wind in a grove of willow. It waits for you. It is a gift from heaven. It is dangerous and strange and awakens the dead.

One of the reasons we cannot believe our senses is because the phenomenon defies any reasonable explanation. But it’s true. Snow is magic. It advances the truth of mutability. I see a haiku in your cheek. And a hunger in your eyes.

I made a strong cup of coffee this morning. Run as fast as you can if you see me coming. I am a peacock. I am a silhouette in the blinds of the window.

A man in a suit stands in the middle of a dirt road. It is Stephan Mallarmé. Holding a suitcase in one hand, and an umbrella in the other. It is 1:47 p.m. The moon is a teaspoon, an idiom of feeling. There is a pitchfork in a ditch, its prongs rusting. What is he doing? Where is he going? Does he know? Is he real?

Yes. Light is composed of waves. But no window ever got lonely by hammers, and no hassock grew a name out of antifreeze and rhetoric. It takes a nerve to pinch the temperature, and a roll of cellophane to crackle exemplification. When the bus comes, hide behind the pathos of tinfoil. Think thick thoughts of ginger. Scold reality. Surrender to the blues. Kiss the occasional peach and clap at each papaya. The world is doing what the world does, which is spin, and splash, and pivot into pantomime, weaving groceries out of words and highways out of wind.