On a Poem’s Hatred of Poets

June 22, 2010

Making a fetish of phantasms– I catch glimpses of you reflected in store windows of archived avenues…

as the earth burns with composting memory, we listen to the wind-pitched speech of rifting rain.

From the mere notion of you, much less your arrival, I wonder: Why did you call me to this place … a world reclaimed by

honey suckle, atavistic grasses, and the last hymns of honey bees? Why did you call this meeting, at this wounded hour,

at the advent of an era that is long past my end but is only the opening salutation of what is to be?

Why — daimon?

You– who hid the jewel box that opens into ancient skies.

You– who arrived late in the Cathedral of Coincidence and caused Time to implode in white flames.

You– stalwart traveler of the vast distances between heartbeats.

You– who caused my wounded heart to bleed starlight.

Once, you told me, “One gnarled oak tree holds up the heavens; all others are pretenders. Beware of those grandiloquent saplings who attempt to woo the untested sky of your fantasy-swooning forebrain.”

Since then, I have seen the sky crack under similar circumstances … the horizon, dawn after dawn, seared with regret.

Not that you were ever around to pick up the pieces; once again, you had given yourself to the morning rain.

What does it matter to you? Neither the Laws of Consequence nor the particulars of location apply to you.

You– who are neither living nor dead.

You– who can never be rattled nor roused from eternal reverie.

You– who, in an instant, grow flowers of infinity from your finger tips.

You– who– with a single raindrop– that dribbles from your shot glass– cause mountains to stagger home drunk, and extinct species to spend eons justifying the folly of their excess to judgmental generations of never-to be-born heirs.

Yet, then again: It was you– who taught me to be amused by the self-referential soliloquies of grandiose motes of coffin dust.

And to listen for the silence held in the womb of thunder.

You tried and failed to teach me to compose music that can only be played by musicians who were drowned in oceanic deliriums.

You made confetti of my convictions then showered them upon wedding processions of ghosts.

Then you cast my complexes in concrete:

Frozen in flesh: Now, I am too slow for you. Most days, you hate me the way a poem hates a poet.

When deracinated on the page, it will never know what it might have become.

Posted in Essays