Rapid Rapid,

closure as
a measure of knotted chests:

yours not his
nor mine
a measure of sleeplessness:

explosion of a moment in
your memory exploding
in mine
an exclusive claim irretrievable

in arms gone: what
of mine?
sparks of a riotous expression

lost: cruel
caprice now
the sight now of your lovely

what now?
closure as
a measure of knotted chests:

of sparks
dimmed then
lost

27 February
22 June 2005

There is a C-section in about 5 hours that I am to observe. I just went to the post office in the midsummer Maine drizzle to drop off letters for a business. My business, which is really someone else's business, but I wanted to make money and I thought the 6 am pick up would allow my word to spread quickly where I need it to go the most, but the 6 am pick up box is actually inside the building where it is locked at night, and though the fluorescent lights are on for the P.O. boxes the space is void of any activity. I left the letters in the outside drop box, where they will not see the light of day until tomorrow at 2:30 pm and I have wasted my time this morning, getting out in the moist air and trying to avoid all manner of normal observance of traffic regulation with the idea that after 11 pm it is perfectly alright to justify the means with the ends, to cut from point A to point B and not have to look back to see what you did or what ground had been beneath the wheels. And here I argued within myself with myself for minutes and Bartok continued in the dashboard. Elegiac, for a lost first wife or mistress, and you wondered how much more he kept inside him that he couldn't have written.

Autopsy
Virginia M. Heatter
American Literary Review
Spring 2006

This is the sky where it meets
the water's surface.

This is the wet ridge of it,
the line between life and drowning.

This is the glow of embers rising
against the rigors of evergreen.

This is a ring of large stones,
and in the nostrils, cedar burning.

This is the sound, still throbbing
in the ear canal, of translucence

passing through narrow tubes.
This is the salt of confluence,

and the sweet of imperfection.
This is melody, harmony, silence.

And this —

is the dead space, the rift
behind the gums, that hollow.

Sounds like a poet got trapped in a pathologist's body. The poet has gone into the morgue and made off with a corpse, lifted it part by part, organ by organ, into syllables belonging to the realm of poetic fantasy. You can hear the faint hints of phonetic borrowing from a medical textbook, inserted between the lines of verse. It says "embers" and you think "embolus, emboli", "rigors of evergreen," "large stones," "throbbing."

A little tenuous, perhaps? Or tedonitis? The cleft of severed scar. Umbilical, abdominal.

is where this was headed:

Last Wednesday I was trying to find three-sevenths of
my soul, which was missing and had eluded me for
the span of my life thus far, but luckily enough
I saw you in all your beauty come through the door
and that's when I knew beyond a doubt that in your love
I found it, my beloved.

Would you believe that there are no words to confess
the depth of my feelings for you, or perhaps you have
already remarked that I am met with emotional distress
and only a pathetic squeak leaves my mouth to save
me from utter silence when I am trying to impress
you, my beloved?

And what of the arrythmia (this I cannot ignore)
that afflicts my heart whenever into your presence
I am thrust, this irregular pounding that is sure
to send me to the emergency room, though in essence
I have never felt better than now, never more
alive, my beloved?

The generic compliments that here I bestow
upon you—hopefully you won't mistake them for mere
empty flattery, for in their generic-ness, though
it may seem trite, they are intended to bear
the universality of what I in my bosom now
hold, my beloved.

For you are like the angel that comes to visit me
when I am infirm, almost dead, beneath a tree, and
your spirit is like a halo—serendipity
itself—compelling me to reach out with my hand
so that you can save me with a caress of mercy
and love, my beloved.

So if you have any of that mercy left, my
beloved, maybe you will overlook the fact
that I screwed up, and forgive me that lie
I told about that one unfaithful act—
and I swear it was only one—so that I
would not have spent this time and racked
my brain for rhyming words for (*sigh*)
nothing.

13 January 2005, Bangor

It starts as a brief pressure,
a twinge somewhere behind
your forehead, a puckering
of your skull; then the dull
ache creeps in, a faint discomfort
above your eyelids making
you squint a little harder,
massaging your eyebrows
as you work, hoping that the
pain doesn't build, but it does;
your eyeballs start to feel
the pressure, then the bridge
of your nose, then the inside
of your head, like some obese
monster is flexing his muscles
against your cranium, until
it spreads to your neck; soon
your back muscles tense up
and your eyes start to lose
focus, and finally your will
loosens—it's time to get
off the computer.

31 January 2005, Bangor

Time to face the facts: if I continue to wait for semi-passable poetry to come pouring out of that numb little head of mine in order to make posts, this blog is dead.

To reconsider: the blog is a dynamic, fluid pursuit of an ideal form of enlightened discourse, the exploration of the writer's principles with respect to the chosen subject matter. The subject here is poetry, the dialogue sought is with the self. The errant jabs at insight represented here are preceded ten times over by repeated acts at uncovering the layers of hazy thought, at navigating the crooked, misguided paths of my mind's meaning.

To translate: what is on my mind is not nor has ever really been poetry and poetry alone. The literary and the artistic are not my true concern, and I'm more comfortable pondering the sociopolitical, the philosophical, the scientific, the sentimental -- maybe what ought to be recorded are the initial insights and dead ends, the potentialities and missing links. I read my own thoughts more than anyone else does, so let these posts be letters to my future self, containing the seeds of what I hope to glean in the form of abstractions from my worldly experiences.

Is my conception of poetry as an end in itself, as poetry for poetry's sake? Maybe that's what I seek, but it's not what I make.