The Poem began after the waiter said, “Binoculars are against the law.” Indecent was the word the waiter struggled for and the poet helped him find. This was in Morocco in 1989, on the first trip the poet took at the age of nineteen after leaving home. Inside her, this almost autonomic system of synapse and sensibility inhaled a big breath of world and right away she saw that the town from the restaurant terrace resembled a crowd of bowed men. It was indecent, those invasions the curved lenses permitted, the intimacy they invented between eye and rooftop, eye and half-curtained window, eye and the line where the flaking, sun-worn crown of the minaret swelled like a fine, aged breast, like a breath-puffed cheek, like a mittened fist into the most exquisite and elemental sky. She hid the binoculars out of view on her lap …
Today’s #ThrowbackThursday is to Daniel Scott Tysdal’s enigmatic, unexpected story, ‘The Poem’. Featured in Issue 12 - Winter 2011, this winding, elusive story examines the formation and revision of art, the shifting nature of perspective and the value we assign to an individual’s history. It’s really quite cool.