Fragment of a Thesis, part 2
(5) The poem of the mind is not divorced From vulgar experience. It is a deer leaping In the wood, the motion of winds breaking The stillness of a summer day.
Poems spring of the primal heart, from Strange vulgar sepals. In the boiling waters Where the mind and heart meet I steep Like tea, leaching tannins of other into each.
That interface of faculty is like Frost says, A condition more than position. In my own state, referencing the hall of reference, I prostrate in deference of the unified scene.
(6) The bard of intext presides in the hall of reference, And takes as a seat the stack of novel and verse, They knew better as a younger, better self. So I am the same, but my throne is a thimble
When I set it against the bard’s. There is time, but what of inelegance Of youth’s eye. How it takes reality Recapitulates it as vulgarity, voice on the radio.
The eye is the source of vulgar As the tongue is source of lingua franca. They both root back to the nerved up Nervous mind, shuddering in its skeletal stall.
(7) Maggie fed magpies, magpies fed Maggie. She waltzed the yard with her seed bag, Swinging it into the spring wind each morning. Then one morning they stole her favorite comb.
The comb was starlight, was the cave, With quartz insets and jade. It was the sun, when viewed up close, With ivory imported, sashayed from the coast.
Maggie went waltzing, waltzing went Maggie. She swung her arms, her gaze Across secret magpie bushes, treebanks, When in the roots she saw the mystery of the comb again.
(8) I dream that I am in the same room As the Pennsylvanian poet Stevens. He quarrels with invisible silent someones About the nature of vulgar reality, haughty self.
They grapple in the purple light of Hartford. The lazy lilac lion approaches the watering hole, The waiting eye. Invisible in that mauve aura, I only deign to listen, like some sleeping fugitive.
There is a giant sense of giants bowling, Creating thunder I hear, lightning I see. What order is this? Is it the very idea of order Or the order of ideas not yet manifest, yet fulfilled.
