The Nature of a Joint
Odd that after yesterday's post, I remembered an amazing conversation I had had with Beth on Sunday. We talked about poetry for a couple of hours at the Young Avenue Deli and one of the (many) conclusions approached was that "PostModernism" had, in many ways, led people to think that THE WORK was solely in critique -- finding out what was big and bad about the past. The result of such excessive emphasis on critique is that it leaves people with a pessimism about the world and others and the past and makes them think that, once they've discovered this network of wrongs, that THE WORK is over. We're free to be cavalier and playful.
That leaves us blind to the work of building something new and good (and maybe small).
Then I find this, from Beth, in my email this morning:
Incident
for Jason
Maybe it's because I know
there's nothing you'd steal from me
that not a cent or a thought
has gotten counted between us,
and everything we've shared
has done its own kind of reckoning
of itself, of the days...and yes,
everything still counts, stares back,
beckons to us. Night never swoops
alone, as though it could be singular,
downward, sudden.
Instead, from the other side
of popular, temporal attention
to the reddening horizon, it climbs
carefully up and over our heads.
And your good hand is here, again,
on my shoulder. Yet there
sits circumstance, casting hard looks like bits
of glass across the wet street, refracting
all (reflecting only so much) light. Only minutes
ago we were children, speaking
of the clarity of mirrors, but now we wake
to spokes of metal covered in plastic
repellant material. Spilling around us,
then stopped in mid-air, the rolling
drops of raw, cold water seem suspended,
whole, other worlds. Each one
spins in a perfect sphere until it hits
some flatter, stronger
surface of clothing, sidewalk, skin.
But after the film slows down,
you are able to see there was not
a time when any one of them
was merely round. You sense
how their edges could give
to the force of wind, and to each
other’s shapes, how they might travel
miles and years in order just to join purposes,
to quench a city's thirst, to flood,
or to rest in muddy pools of silent
agreement, waiting for sun
to raise them up again, together,
from wherever they have fallen,
moving through and past whatever else
grows closer to the ground
and looks up at the clouds of them, figuring
wings to be the greatest invention
for reaching with. Still, we are gripped here,
and your hand is on my shoulder,
as we find ourselves watching over
a stranger going certainly, naturally
colder with what appears to come
effortlessly from him, a liquid release,
confessing to its own weight-thicker and darker,
even, than the sticky, black road
beneath his head, spreading under our feet.
Our worries are not the same
as his were, and his pain is no longer
like ours. But we will stay here
until the sirens reach our ears,
take the scene to mind
in freeze-frame shots of strobing
blue, try to answer all
the questions with equal measures
of gravity, let this strange event
into the house of our evening, the weather
slipping its tones into our conversation,
our memories vivid, dripping with the heavier
color of this man's absence, like feathers
dipped in blood. We will stand in this place
because somewhere inside us
we want desperately to run, because
somehow we understand
how little it is, to know what we want
and resist having it for the moment,
that resistance can be smaller and more
gracious than we thought possible before,
and never more necessary for us than tonight,
that guiltlessness is a stolen sense, a state
of unbearably mute freedom, and real witness
must be verbal, accountable: every borrowed
word returned, every flight breaking out of form
with the flock a matter of concern for the soul
of any other bird, every murder a murder of crows.
Both knockabout and paulonleave made me remember that the personal (and the desire that accompanies it) is never separate from our public, our political, lives. Maybe aeshetics and politics must be understood as utterly separate things, but they always have their hands on each other's shoulders.
It is possible poetry moves the people through their politics. And therefore remains integral by remaining both intimate and public. Maybe?
And instead of hopelessness or frustration, it does me immense good to remember and appreciate those who keep me in mind of poetry, always, who nudge the heads and hearts along.
As we do, poetry has a way of surviving ... .
That leaves us blind to the work of building something new and good (and maybe small).
Then I find this, from Beth, in my email this morning:
Incident
for Jason
Maybe it's because I know
there's nothing you'd steal from me
that not a cent or a thought
has gotten counted between us,
and everything we've shared
has done its own kind of reckoning
of itself, of the days...and yes,
everything still counts, stares back,
beckons to us. Night never swoops
alone, as though it could be singular,
downward, sudden.
Instead, from the other side
of popular, temporal attention
to the reddening horizon, it climbs
carefully up and over our heads.
And your good hand is here, again,
on my shoulder. Yet there
sits circumstance, casting hard looks like bits
of glass across the wet street, refracting
all (reflecting only so much) light. Only minutes
ago we were children, speaking
of the clarity of mirrors, but now we wake
to spokes of metal covered in plastic
repellant material. Spilling around us,
then stopped in mid-air, the rolling
drops of raw, cold water seem suspended,
whole, other worlds. Each one
spins in a perfect sphere until it hits
some flatter, stronger
surface of clothing, sidewalk, skin.
But after the film slows down,
you are able to see there was not
a time when any one of them
was merely round. You sense
how their edges could give
to the force of wind, and to each
other’s shapes, how they might travel
miles and years in order just to join purposes,
to quench a city's thirst, to flood,
or to rest in muddy pools of silent
agreement, waiting for sun
to raise them up again, together,
from wherever they have fallen,
moving through and past whatever else
grows closer to the ground
and looks up at the clouds of them, figuring
wings to be the greatest invention
for reaching with. Still, we are gripped here,
and your hand is on my shoulder,
as we find ourselves watching over
a stranger going certainly, naturally
colder with what appears to come
effortlessly from him, a liquid release,
confessing to its own weight-thicker and darker,
even, than the sticky, black road
beneath his head, spreading under our feet.
Our worries are not the same
as his were, and his pain is no longer
like ours. But we will stay here
until the sirens reach our ears,
take the scene to mind
in freeze-frame shots of strobing
blue, try to answer all
the questions with equal measures
of gravity, let this strange event
into the house of our evening, the weather
slipping its tones into our conversation,
our memories vivid, dripping with the heavier
color of this man's absence, like feathers
dipped in blood. We will stand in this place
because somewhere inside us
we want desperately to run, because
somehow we understand
how little it is, to know what we want
and resist having it for the moment,
that resistance can be smaller and more
gracious than we thought possible before,
and never more necessary for us than tonight,
that guiltlessness is a stolen sense, a state
of unbearably mute freedom, and real witness
must be verbal, accountable: every borrowed
word returned, every flight breaking out of form
with the flock a matter of concern for the soul
of any other bird, every murder a murder of crows.
Both knockabout and paulonleave made me remember that the personal (and the desire that accompanies it) is never separate from our public, our political, lives. Maybe aeshetics and politics must be understood as utterly separate things, but they always have their hands on each other's shoulders.
It is possible poetry moves the people through their politics. And therefore remains integral by remaining both intimate and public. Maybe?
And instead of hopelessness or frustration, it does me immense good to remember and appreciate those who keep me in mind of poetry, always, who nudge the heads and hearts along.
As we do, poetry has a way of surviving ... .