Periodic reminder my daughter will be my age in 2056
I stole a cooling rack from home to dry the flags I make
guaranteeing a flag won’t be made tonight, rack shamed
I am reading Diana Seuss’ *Frank* and Blake Butler’s *300,000,000*
screaming better than I can scream apocalypse at me so I won’t at you
2056, I’d be 97, laugh, my dad at 90 in fifteen days
got out what he paid into, my 42 years paid into stolen by 2026
I’d buy a ticket today to 2036 for my daughter
(DEATH DOES NOT EXIST IN POETRY)
Diane Seuss
Death does not exist in poetry. A line may fade into the silence past its breaking
but that is not death. No coking sounds in poems, no smell of blood. I can describe
the sounds, the smells, but description is, in fact, a hiding place. There is no nobility
in description. Is there nobility in poems? Let's hope not. Nobility is another place
to hide. "Through all these myriad felt and mostly scorned and disreputable realities,"
Alan wrote in a poem. I hope it is OK that I have quoted you, Alan. It is a poem
about love's nuance but Alan would agree there is no love in poems. There is no love
in a mushroom, in a handmade wedding dress. Not death in a funeral hankie
embroidered with the words "Try not to use it." I looked at the worm and I thought
it was an angel. I looked at an angel and thought it was a storm. What is wrong
with the mind is what is wrong with the poem. It is difficult to ge the news-
boy to be a newsboy. He keeps turning into a girl carrying a fish in a cloth delivery
bag to her grandmother who is really a wolf dressed as a grandmother singing a line
from Ulysses: "So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other."
jussi palmusaari asks " If time is not a line stretching from the past to the future, chaining causes and effects, how can it form the horizon for strategical political action?"
ReplyDeletei seem to recall that i recently read that kurt vonnegut had claimed he had precognitive visions of his experiences in dresden that led to his novel slaughterhouse five - but right now i don't find where i read it - did i really read it? and if vonnegut said it, was it really true?
it's a long and winding road - better to travel hopefully than to arrive, someone said