78. The Good Book

 

addled but |intemperate to a degree

that would kill | anything else

paddled but | only in the sense of

viciously | as a means of inculcating

grace | these symbols do not represent

they are as we have found them | pure

we cannot make sense | of the word

so we must make hay | with its meaning

do you regret the future | and appreciate

the past | racing up to you | just

to acquire your autograph | photograph

autophotograph | the pure whole

human thing | a thing ensconced in

beauty | yet rebarbative to the extreme?

we think | we wait | we try | we fail

the human life | in four steps | we

remember | in the sense that we don’t

forget everything | we carry these

thin pink scars | to remind us of the past
so we realize | we live in the future

 

control is | a matter of in fact it maybe

doesn’t exist | take for instance the

spoke of a word | that juts straight out

of a sentence | spun a little too wildly

by a tongue to remain | unincandescent

did the making of | this sentence come

with deliberate intention | out of the

fingers of a typing man | intent on

that pure dominion | over language

or was some external force | in one

case | reportedly the Martians | ran

dumbly | distorting the poet’s ends?

piston | piston | piston | piston | we

believe | yet maybe it is merely the

creaking of the air conditioner that

disrupts the typing | or the thirst of

the poet | for mere water | the need

to rise up out of the chair | and walk

or maybe the poem | incarnate

desolate | distillate | that seeps into

the poet | and out her aquiline fingers

 

pleasure in the push but | the want to

the try | pleasure in the inquisite failure

what we can learn by asking | over knowing

figures in the shapes of | letters of the

sounds slipping into our ears | into them

so we understand | as if understanding

were natural | in a world we cannot

believe in | if only they had proof of life

so we could know | we were living here

paddlefish when sturgeon aren’t handy

when we remove | from a poem all

its extravagance | we find ourselves

holding up to our | purblind eyes

holding close to our | buggy ears

a poem so pretty in its barrenness

we cannot slake | our thirst for it

thus it is today | on your day when

you are thinking up a poem you do not

know the outlines of | in expectation

we will hear your voice through its face