On Poetry: Strange Thresholds
1
It’s not so much the hearing of a speaking voice
but rather an overhearing of the whispering of words together,
the riffle of the turning pages of the book you left on its own
in the other room measuring its distance from you.
2
It’s the spaces, the interstices, of the synapse and the
cell, of the bed, the little moments between lovers’
lips, between the living and the dead, where everything happens,
whispering, syllable by syllable beside the threshold of grass.
Do you hear it, speaking to itself? Under leaf ripple?
Under needle sigh? Under the always inward facing light?
3
Each word is a threshold through which a writer and a reader can actually pass,
moving with an agitation that the life of each has created, the way a leaf
trembles in late evening, alternately revealing the gloss of one side and the moondust
of the other, not merely a materiality, not merely a referentiality, but this place of crossing over.
Identities are this flimsy. We talk ourselves into it; we write, reading. Language materializes.
Out of what? ‘Longing to get through to you.’
4
Some at the crossroads become contaminated complicit under its erased universal evil of atomic priesthood with terror hero which soul and body ritual and legend systems notwithstanding normal other cleansing in total truth knows and would make transcendent vermin rainbows of oil in water colour download neutral said justice therefore we ghost in tender buttons neither in this nor in that neither in borderlands nor in homelands and this is only english at the crossroads.
5
And then for whom exactly?
Not for those in the same words already over inscribed, surely?
But in other words, then? For other words?
For the unrepeatably unspoken, for
water speech, stone speech, for what the clouds script, the
tangled bicycle amid the whispering of grasses and goldenrod.
6
Let’s go at it by way of a different door. Let’s imagine a Hindu Akashic library where every event that ever occurred and every event that will ever occur exits simultaneously and each event speaks volumes and every word in each volume knows all the others. Here nothing is represented. Memory objects. Desire objects. Including this object. Loaded with the pollen of being.
7
What keeps coming back? And when we come to an ending why do we soon find it continues a little further, and a little further yet? I find myself for instance wanting my father to come back and walk into the room and speak to me. Ur think, ink dream of the earth.
Which is ours but doesn’t belong to us, tracing us out. And even those on the other side have to let it.