The Forgotten Greatness Of Poetry

I am fascinated by corollaries, by flux and spatulas. Syntax lingering among words of might and sinew. Nouns in an uproar of meaning. Adjectives dripping suggestion. I see fugitives and ducks. Warps and woofs. I live in a world of looms. I can see people pulling and people pushing and people in theatres watching movies. The ground is abrupt. Thinking is sand. Handsprings migrate through successions of sounds. It’s structural and yet spreads into barley. I like a sky that spins with swallows and alters the suspension of time.

I like a man that can do drywall. I like what rambling does to the irregularities of the face. I’m a rhetoric glistening with failure. I know how privacy happens. An airplane shakes with biography and this makes me giving and foreign. There is an experience that composes this sentence and it’s full of zippers. I churn inside to tell you there is a point to Chicago. These words are haunted by your eyes. Your eyes are the ghosts of this sentence. This sentence is the ghost of your eyes. It’s an invocation of beans.

What does it is goggles. Goldfish cause these words to move forward into another sentence, another domain of possibility, another map to unfold on the table and study the streets for signs of nudism. Nudism, as you know, is largely a hospitality. Pronouns bond to it like bone. The impact of the body in the water causes it to splash all over the guests.

And this is an answer. And a provocation. I know what it is to have a body, but I do not know what it is to be a moon or a horseshoe. The imponderable features of thought slide from the mouth in speech. It changes nothing, at least not right away, while buffalo graze at the side  of the road, and Wyoming greets us with a sign and a constellation of bullet holes. 

A stream of words passes through me on the way to writing. It’s a pleasant sensation, like travel. The elevator doors slide shut. The elevator begins its ascent and suddenly stops and everyone looks at one another hoping for an answer, a response, a good joke, anything that will help make one short moment in life explicable, a skein of cause and effect that is easily untangled and put to work again. The elevator starts up and everyone returns to their daydreaming.

The harder I try to represent the delicacies of the garden the more my writing begins to resemble a rhinoceros. I decide to be satisfied with a rhinoceros. But then the rhinoceros grows a pair of velvety wings and the writing assumes a lighter feeling. I decide to make the rhinoceros an angel. But the harder I try to make the rhinoceros appear to be an angel the more does it begin to resemble the delicacies of a garden.

I surrender to the facts of light and shadow. I clear my throat and begin to speak. I feel an exaltation of words emerge. They shoot out of my mouth in flames and taffeta. Large black holes that tumble across the floor causing the furniture to disappear.

And reappear. Because that is what it does. What thought does. Things appear and disappear. They float through the brain like clouds. But if they’re written they become tenable, industrial, and a little beside the point.

They become wine. They become intimate and Wittgenstein. They become art in the United States and crusty white and colored threads and an almost abstract kind of literalness. Every fresh and unfulfilled preoccupation prove more immediately fruitful than all the things I had in my brain yesterday, which are now busy reaffirming something else, an embodiment of light, of poverty and war, for no other reason than the smashing of fragments, in order to keep turning them over to find something new, a wholly irrelevant weather of hotels and whirlpools and the forgotten greatness of poetry.