#after language

[gustaving]

By Chaia Heller

[proemproem]

Poem #114 (Afterlanguage)

In aftermath, the brave and strict are daredevils;

spine first into dirt, they’ve already named their fate.  

Only the dumb dreamer experiences his ordeal as absorbable,

even though it’s all falling off him, all around—

the literal water and also the words to describe

how he drowned. To explicate, make clear,

is the greatest thing and held away from truth.

The truth knows that the truth’s too much, and who

is around to figure it out anyway—and where.

Behold the handsaw, a clear-cut horror

that clear-cuts where the horror goes.

I’ve pulled all the leaves from the trees.

Someone held a rake out to me, said: Clean up,

and I’ve earned degrees in finding the easiest way.

Pick a gunrunner for the miserable charity of your choice

because real mercy is all about death

and has more to do with timing than anything else.

The metal pin is stoic, not confused like breath

wandering around with a headache, brandishing, threatening.

Cinder betrays the truth: there once was flame,

so let the smoldering begin, indignant and alive,

spelling out how there was never once a fire in this world.                

[theexplosionofideal]

Nothing says that poetry won't drive you to squalor. Or a big love gone way sad. The last big joke on the makers is that the poems, those silly, enormous things, go way beyond whatever was us. Eternity—those poems—has nothing of you in it. The rearview mirror is a joke. The clarity of what was left behind is mere gossip. The mirror is covered with tinfoil. As you say, Jack, only poems talk to poems.

Stephen Vincent After Language: Letters to Jack Spicer