Nocture With Aesthetic Crisis
Middle of the night I wake and realize I've been assembling
an acknowledgments page, not a book. Middle of the night I wake
to rain, quiet, time passing in the dark. You know, they do pay
for poems. $50 or so, direct deposit sometimes, ten burritos
or an oil change, and all I have to do is slant wreath
and grief, shudder and brother, break the line where stress sponsors
feeling, say please, my pleasure, go for a walk. It's like I've said-
everything is permitted these days or, what amounts to
the same thing, forbidden. Pretending rain in August
on the border. Knowing every raindrop by its name.
Weather-time passing-brother-love in the dark. Translation
is something I don't practice, practice all the time, like dreaming
or shaving-lone pearl of blood-then waking with a beard,
renewed faith in composition. The greatest translator, of course,
is death, but why say anything about death when I'm dying,
have been dying for years? Tiresome. Please wire some
money-the discipline is in crisis. The book is in crisis, poems
slipping into prose, bad prose, thoughts rushing toward a cliff.
Just don't say cliff. Or lemming. If you say lemming just
make sure they drown plausibly. Audibly, the stresses falling
about us, beyond material constraint. I love watching
the shadows on water, tiny at first, like raindrops, I love
how quickly they swell, take shape-swell, I said-
falling, the darkness on water, quiet, before impact.
an acknowledgments page, not a book. Middle of the night I wake
to rain, quiet, time passing in the dark. You know, they do pay
for poems. $50 or so, direct deposit sometimes, ten burritos
or an oil change, and all I have to do is slant wreath
and grief, shudder and brother, break the line where stress sponsors
feeling, say please, my pleasure, go for a walk. It's like I've said-
everything is permitted these days or, what amounts to
the same thing, forbidden. Pretending rain in August
on the border. Knowing every raindrop by its name.
Weather-time passing-brother-love in the dark. Translation
is something I don't practice, practice all the time, like dreaming
or shaving-lone pearl of blood-then waking with a beard,
renewed faith in composition. The greatest translator, of course,
is death, but why say anything about death when I'm dying,
have been dying for years? Tiresome. Please wire some
money-the discipline is in crisis. The book is in crisis, poems
slipping into prose, bad prose, thoughts rushing toward a cliff.
Just don't say cliff. Or lemming. If you say lemming just
make sure they drown plausibly. Audibly, the stresses falling
about us, beyond material constraint. I love watching
the shadows on water, tiny at first, like raindrops, I love
how quickly they swell, take shape-swell, I said-
falling, the darkness on water, quiet, before impact.