Howl Of The Hellgrammite

The anarchic cloth bag leaning against the table is because many of my Fauve exercises need a glimpse of Cézanne. Cables, pulleys, adjustable seats. Big mountains. Cylinders, spheres, cones. Ambiguous perspectives. A phantom architecture— what we call the hypothetical—wanders straight ahead and screams into the void. You can walk among a group of people with the sensitivity of a burn victim and still manage to piss someone off. Nerves are on edge, as they say. Everyone looks like they’re circling an emotion, unsure of its wildness and tractability. This is to be expected. The heart is where we take root. The mind is where we flower.

An uprising in algebra can upset a hypothesis, but a marvel in words, a description of hell by a spirit of iron boldness, can empower the making of any incision in the air, out of which plops the future of our tribe. Diagnosis is a ghost of predication. An X-ray's phantom bones. My whisper is nonsense. But navigable as any Géricault, or Corot. These feathers will fuse to a swan if the right force is applied to the grammar of sympathy.    

Snow falls upon a greedy life and says fix this, someone. And so somebody does and it looks like a palace of ice. The reflection of it grows inside the embryo after your strain to live it. We all live behind a face. You either learn to trust it, or at least give it a good haircut. There’s an easel in the corner with a canvas on it. The image of a woman sprawled in folds of space, a face anonymous as silk. There are occasions when the absence of warmth is itself a form of heat. Whatever hangs down, cast it forth; let a wild nature set your invocation ablaze. I’m feeling greedy now, and intriguing, and kerosene. Am I conjugable? I have voice, mood, tense, number, and person. Places to go, things to be, gatherings to attend, moods to pursue, ideas to thrash and parry, doors to open, perceptions to unearth. Invention isn’t easy. Poetry, completely shattered, carries its compulsions with grace. The last time I visited a planetarium I fell asleep. And when I awoke, I was no longer on planet Earth. I don’t know where I was. Europa. The Crab Nebula, maybe. Proxima Centauri, improbable, implausible, but wholly laudable. Which is what I meant to say all along, that poetry isn’t just a planetarium, it’s the whole damn universe.

Age riddles the skin. We become wise, but nobody listens. We become pioneers of the ephemeral, the legendary, and the crepuscular. We become hermits in crowds and philosophers in towels. Our eyebrows go crazy and our umbrellas break. The night walks out of itself then walks back into itself, humming Moon River. And it does this every day, strains to get a hold on things, then lets it go. I believe they call this Japan. Though it might also be a miniature universe, pouring itself all over the bed.

Sometimes you can spot a poem on a page and for whatever reason do a deep dive into it and discover an entire panorama of riddles and complexities and endless associations. I think that’s important, especially now, as the empire collapses, and the first thing to go, as always, is virtue. Eyes look haunted and potentially savage. The streets are full of hungry ghosts. At night, the stars are blocked by the edifice of progress. Various narratives shape its evolution. Most are elegies, but some bite into the big cookie and become tokens of moral appraisal. They become fables, harmonicas, and drifters. Adepts of emphasis. Masters of Kabuki. The narratives are critical to the maintenance of illusion. One in particular, an allegory, takes shape at the heart of a captivating text, amidst so many shades of gray it’s difficult to name any of them with any hope of accuracy. Personhood gets ruminative, and weird. It drifts further and further from the familiar, and ends up in a comic book, making an incision in a sheet of paper as a poem oozes forth, howling like a hellgrammite. The eyes are black. The wings are maroon. It rises. It intrigues. It organizes itself into a chrysalis, and emerges months later in the dazzling hues of crisis.