All I Want To Do Is Root

There is a peculiarity of poetry, that when it becomes a habit of mind, it converts everything to poetry. Space, gyroscopes, tire tread. Somewhere there must be a poetry of tire tread. There is much to be said about tread. Tread is all about traction. Traction doesn’t come easy. The grooves are essential. The grooves are designed to expel water and keep the car from hydroplaning when it rains heavily on the freeway. Grooves are ingenious. Poetry is a groove. Grooves are a groove. Most poetry isn’t even a matter of invention it’s a matter of discovery. Observation. Traction comes with practice. Traction is a force. It has to be rolled on the road to get the scope of its grip.

Society wants us ground down so that we’re easy to deal with. Society doesn’t want complicated people, testy people, it wants easy people, obedient people. Productive people. People who render a service. Who agree. Who offer tangible goods.

Poets are the fools who tilt toward asymmetry and piccolos. What is this but saying that the task of the piccolo doesn’t end until the drums create the foundational rhythm we require to scale the walls of heaven?

The kind of traction poetry cultivates is designed to get us on the mountain roads, the rough roads, the roads where ice and ruts form. The tough roads lead us up and then they give out and we’re left with lichen and rock. Society’s smoke and hullabaloo are out of earshot.

But don’t get me wrong, friction is useful. Friction produces heat. The molecules rub the surface and get hotter and hotter until words resist the orthodoxy and spit fat hot moons of transcendent possibility at the zeitgeist eating its own progeny.

Poetry consists in its process, not its material. The material is immaterial. The process is unprocessed perception. The mess of living, which is a blessing, and an enigma. Anyone who can see interrelation in the unrelated is capable of producing works that grip the road like stigma.  

Think of it as energy conservation in a harmonic oscillator, sinusoidal oscillations about the equilibrium point with a constant amplitude and a constant frequency. The leaky bucket on the way to the barn, the trembling of strings on a Stradivarius.

It is the not the words themselves that form poetry but the smell of New Mexico in turquoise or the appearance of angels on the brim of a sombrero. It is the trembling in the atmosphere of the most distant stars, the digestive organs of worms, or the shawl of a single bacillus hunched over on its way to an important disease. The disease of living, which is a terrible disease, as it leads to more and living, and spontaneity, and loons.

I never set out to prove anything. I never set out to persuade anyone. All I want to do is root around in the earth looking for truffles. And then give it to you: a dark fungal lump of ineffable pungency crammed with the fragrance of death and earth and the secrets of Lascaux.