Thursday, March 20, 2008

Physicality for Poets


I lay back on the bed and tried to read a book
called “Physics for Poets,” but Bach was
on the radio and he knew more about it
so I listened to his D minor concerto
for two violins and let its counterpoint
reverberate until it got me closer to the gist:

strange to send a poem splaying out like this –
it might as well be prose. But categories such as those
all close their lids on the ability to breathe, and here
I go again, back to that metered rhyming seething
rock-and-rolling flow without which I do not
appear to know exactly how to get from
to to fro. Here’s what really frazzles –

the bedazzling undesirability of
doctor’s check-ups and their
reasoned take on how your
apparatus works, or ought to,
or would work if only you were one whit
less lit by your staunch refusal to believe in flesh
or gravity or fluid circulation, neural networks
which entail a three-dimensioned focus:

an attention quite beyond your interest,
truth be told. To make bold about it,
where’s the book on “Physicality
for Poets Who Don’t Know
That They Are Here?”

I am feeling mortal,
darling: ergo
queer.

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