The old dead poet
told the other poet,
newer, younger, fresher,
that we loan our horizons
out across a field of denials
to believe against sorrow and loss
that vistas await us, our tracks to forge
new paths, our bleak and endangered
souls to see since rays of hope where
none…I paraphrase. Because
the younger poet quoted the dead
for sixteen lines, and then had
the unmitigated gall to expand, expound,
exjoyce, exstevens, annotate, expediate and
regurgitate on the poetic sense
of horizons, paths and denials for
some 750 lines. In 7-point font. I got
bored, I don’t mind saying, even though
the language was accomplished,
the meter was studied and true,
and the form was familiar. The message itself
blew. Whole chunks of the epic simply did not
make sense, even for the second language known
as Poetry. There was no poem present, and poetry
without poem depresses, causes angst,
anxiety and the want to riot
uncontrollably in the streets
of sheltered arts districts pocketed
throughout our nascent nation.
I compare it to a studious musician,
blowing on a xylophone, trying to make
it sound like Mingus’s sax,
reading the transcription right to left, and
learning notation on the fly. It’s just wrong
in every single aspect: you can’t blow
a xylophone, comfortably, Charles
did not play sax, musical transcript
isn’t Arabic, and notation might cruise
but it does not soar.
This comes to mind for the usual reasons,
of course, the daily contemplation of
the minutiae of xylophone mechanics,
why not notate right to left
as it would be easier for one-handed
trumpet players to flip the pages, but
mainly because I still see you,
some eighteen years later, more
substantial than a shadow but just
as untouchable. I’m not smart enough
to speak of the unspeakable, to hazard
a guess for what if, to perchance
a dream for a pathetic maybe, one day…
I have very real questions about the
necessity of the word perchance when used
in the first language for it truly only works
in the second, Poetry, when you need
to rhyme dance and maybe just won’t work.
But is that really relevant, my doubts towards
choice, my disregards when it come to pro-
piety? A fair concern
is what it does for me, or for you. Granted,
less esoteric than goofed wanderings after
the right to left transcripts of Arabic versus
Western. If you’re still with me, it is fair
to begin to wonder where
xylophones and 7-point fonts play
into your absence, eighteen years now,
and why I’m held to hold you still as though
seeing you were enough, as if allowing this
too brief time with you would send me tail-
spinning after replacements for the many
minutes since…yes, I count the years in minutes,
well, formula now, to attribute this aspect
of you to her, and this one to her,
and so on.
I might as well write this unreadably small,
or blow until I’m expirated on the useless-
unless-struck unperforated pipes awaiting
a whole different sort of blow.
When the world is not enough, words provide everything
else that is the case, and language itself be-
comes the muse for what is her
in your absence,
a struck perchance
unless instant-
ly useless-
ly distant,
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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