And This Is Why The Poem Must Come

 According to Empedocles, there’s a distance infinitely removed from the day, which is also what is most intimate to us, more interior than any interiority.

The poem is what opens, what in opening is a call for everything else to open, to enlighten itself, to come to light.

You have to know where to look. It could be in a bin of lettuce. Or a pharmacy in Pocatello, Idaho. A sex worker washing windows on a brothel out on the alkali desert 30 miles east of Sparks. A timber king sitting down to a plate of juicy roast beef. Who suddenly takes a dive into the mashed potatoes. Death by myocardial infarction.

You never know just where or how it’s going to happen.

I’m not sure what anything is anymore.

I never really got into religion much. But I do believe in ghosts. Not like the one in Hamlet. More like qualia that stir the blood. Churn of starlings over barren earth. That urge to call a friend or brother or sister that’s been dead for years. That hummingbird hovering inches from your face. That horse on the other side of the mirror. That monkey wrapped around your leg at Angkor Wat. That elusive haiku waiting to be discovered among the ferns in a stand of redwood.

Think of it as a can of soup. You’ll need a can opener. And to escape the prison imposed on you in childhood.

When I was 13, I became obsessed with fighter jets. I remember staring at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It was the power, the roar of jets. But I was slow at math. And captivated by music. Green Sleeves. Green Onions. He’s A Rebel. Twist and Shout. The One Who Really Loves You. Blowin’ in the Wind.

The quality of the highway surface on I-90 worsens markedly once you leave Ellensburg and begin to rise into the Cascades.

Why is that? Why are the highways to the east of the Cascades better maintained than the highways to the west?

We stopped for gas in Moses Lake and headed into the night.

The surrounding country was desolate, flat, and lonely.

I saw Mars to the east.

A glowing red dot as desolate as the highway we were driving on.

I enjoy following the data coming into Nasa from the Mars Rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. The desolation is so stark, so immaculate in its austerity, it’s spellbinding. It looks familiar and strange at the same time. Reddish dust with the character of iron under a pink sky with a shrunken sun gives the mind a craving for life. The drama is quiet. It’s a funny drama. This is a place of giant soliloquies uttered by a phantom life that may once have existed. Rocks resembling faces and bones mock the familiar comforts of a carpet and chair. How did this happen? These fingers typing these words. These words. These feelings. These longings. Propinquity and protein. Kinfolk and kneecaps. Illusions and disillusions. Primal mutterings. Dogs wagging tails. Orioles on a prairie. Clean bedsheets. Egyptian mummies. Nonsense and noodles. Gothic architecture. Tearful goodbyes to the dying.

The sound of our sun is an eerie howl.

The sound of the universe is a low-pitched hum. Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ.

But there are no molecules to carry the sound. “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Alien.  Ridley Scott.

Man in a Chevy Silverado doing 90. Hard, determined look. Takes the exit to Ritzville.

A dead coyote at the side of the road.

There comes a point where reality is so hard, so brutal, so unforgiving, so absurdly merciless, it makes you want to laugh.

This feeling of an es tagt, of "the day is breaking," which makes possible - as much of the night as the day - the chaos as well as the gods, this font of divine light that radiates through all of Hölderlin's work, drawing it up with light, pure light, the allure of the pure ray, and because of this the words are suffused with a light beyond the light, which is clarity itself, and all clarity.

For the jubilation of the Universe always tends to distance itself from the earth and leave it stripped; if humans don't hold it back.

…that is to say the poet, calls it so as not to get lost in the expansive infinity that it derives from its origins: as it is, it is indeed a limitless totality and that must be, but it must also be that "without limits" becomes its limit, is integrated into the totality, and this is why the poem must come.

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*Lines in italics from La Parole “Sacrée” de Hölderlin by Maurice Blanchot.