The July heat settles in deep as belief, and I write,
and I lose,
like it’s a romance, or a war.
So I put my pen down for a while to sweat in the shade,
trying to learn a thing or two from Susan Sontag—
it’s a biography I’m reading, and something her friend Stephen Koch says sends me spinning:
“You can be a dazzling artist and know practically nothing.”
Susan did not know this until she met Irene Fornés, one such dazzling artist.
Maybe she never really knew it—
even the most brilliant writers can be blind to obvious truths:
don’t mistake scholarship for the tides
of your soul.
But I don’t even know
myself—
I know I am surprised, shocked even, by the pinprick sight of a firefly
making light up in the walnut trees—an impossible height for those little wings.
But what’s beneath this reverence for being?
What do I have to say about wonder, about love,
that Joana Newsom did not already expound with the blade of her sparrow-voice:
“landlocked in bodies that don’t keep—
dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,
till we don’t be.”
I keep writing. (I am always
writing.) But I can’t seem to see anything through,
like a wave, summer-warm, but frozen mid-crest—
not Sontag;
not a poem;
not pleasure; not desire.
I am caught in some terrible liminality: blue as dawn, and waiting
for any goddamned bird to sing.
There are an infinite number of schools of thought on art, of course.
Louise Glück, for example, famously brushed aside a story
about the death of a writer’s sister, easy as sand, and simply asked: “What else?”
When I dive into my own amateur
words, I find the water is shallow—
and I can’t find anything solid, not even a slab of shale, beneath the glassy surface.
Where does the answer live, then? in the wind?
The afternoon wind is lake-made: thick and fevered and wet,
and the tomato plants swoon beneath its heavy hand,
like lovers in a crowded room;
maybe I should turn to Mary Oliver after all,
(as no self-serious poet should ever admit to another)—
in the forward to Long Life, Mary calls her poems “little alleluias”,
which, she writes as earnest and solemn as Sontag, “just sit there on the page, and breathe.”
If a poem may simply be
the water,
perhaps the reaching down, and down, to grope, and seek meaning
is just one glittering piece of this telos—
I live in feeling. I live for feeling:
sweat gathering on my upper lip, hot blood rushing under my skin,
cool water kissing my sunburnt feet—
these words are feeling, interpreted.
Attempted.
Held
out in my calloused hands to you: please, lighten the weight
of being that thumps in my chest. With words, I will lighten yours,
like a firefly lights up twilight with its bioluminescence—
another word for magic—
I am up in the walnut trees, calling out: Here I am.
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