thispresentsojourn

Could you marry grist
and ground, and does not
the former emerge from
the latter? Climb
some woolly mammoth
of meaning on the wrist;
burned and engraved
on our hearts. When I met
the Architect, I scribbled across
His blueprints with a Number
two pencil; That I’d color his court
houses with Crayons. Poor and bare-
naked trees clothed with Green
in leaf; Seems so sudden!

Or, is my heart so hard as to not see?
Spring forth, if weathering is past! Eat
some lukewarm pourage or inhale
meals of steam. Even the mange
shed skin. Tears.

“No more tears!” whispers the Lamb,
“No more fears!” the Lion roars.

So we settle in our plights,
Separate as they came, some Mammoth
of Meaning burned and engraved
upon our hearts.

Saw the Strawman in
Summer’s Volcano baking–
Magma on our wrists.

[I'm up before the finches, just after Lauds, and during a simple sipping of coffee.]

One thing the first Monday of each month means is that The New Yorker sends forth its publishable Poetry&Fiction into the interwebs for the enjoyment and evaluation of the masses. Excitement over the publication usually sees me staying up late first Sunday evenings to read through the new pieces [they are published at 12 AM ET], unable to wait a dawn later for new quixoticquerying.

The thing I noticed upon reading my very first Billy Collins poem [I guess over a year ago now] is that my written voice is not as gregarious as improvement might make it. Often here, the content of a piece determines its form [and yet most of the time the Form teaches me something of the Substance], but at least, I’ll hope I’ve made some sort of move from the abstract shroudiness my Xanga [that time of my life] embodied.

Anyway, opening the New Yorker RSS feed this morning I stumbled upon a piece by Albert Goldbarth – one from whom I hadn’t read previously – wherein he brings to light what Work’s to be done with Word [or our inability to complete it], while optimistically admitting that sometimes we must push a device invented especially for such a Project.

THE WAY

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose

of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.