A Poem Written in reply to Don Share's Tweet

 

This poem is the result of an exchange on Twitter prompted by Don Share's tweet (in which he quoted the novelist Ali Smith as saying that poets should revere translators) to which I then replied reverence has nothing to do with it -- which as a translator I feel entitled to say -- and he replied he reveres his masters and so on....

And so we tweeted

Back and forth the other day

About the aptness of reverence

For poets and translators
Masterful or otherwise

Yet there was one more thing

I still wanted to say

Because even for poets

I’m inclined to revere

-- like Neruda Akhmatova or Blake --

I would be astonished

If any one of them 

Had ever intended

For their words

To be fetishized thus

Or construed so as to impose

An anthropomorphic gloss

On what is and always

Remains a matter of

The poet’s deepest

Abiding faith

To say nothing

Of the greatest sages of all time

Such as Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou

For whom meaning subsumed 

To the messenger  

Would be inimical 

To the Dao itself

And so it goes with

The best of poems

As with any testament or sutra

That it may be understood

More as means to an end

Or an expression of striving

Rather than exalted as

An end or meaning that's
Been fully attained

Words Spoken to a Muse in a Hotel Room in Syracuse New York

 

So no one can accuse me

Of not laying it out on the line

Most of the time

From the very title of it

Leaving little room for doubt

About with whom I'm speaking
Or where I've been

That’s what you call

The network effect

Of modern life

Filling in the story
The way the eye likes

To complete the arc 

Of the rainbow's glory

From only a hint of color

We laughed and drank and talked
And then like a couple 
Of old ghosts draped in muslin

We danced in the moonlight

At the end of the hall

While Marissa took a short nap

*  *  *  *  *

 

--> Marissa crashed out on the bed not long after we checked into the hotel – it had been a long day’s drive, and she’d spent more than 3 hours behind the wheel.   The traffic droned by on the Interstate that ran parallel to the parking lot just outside the motel window.  I sat and after a while fell into a meditative trance.  Then I went downstairs to change the air freshener in the car.  A puff or two later I was all set and went back upstairs.  The drapes at the end of the hallway billowed in the breeze.  Or was it something else, a dust devil perhaps or the exhalation from a nearby air vent?  

Because life is inherently interesting – that’s what I told myself – that’s reason enough to keep writing, even if it only means that I continue scribbling things down in one my little notebooks.  With a memory so porous as mine, there is simply no other way to keep track of all the amazing things that happen in the course of an otherwise quite ordinary day.

Poetry entails a sort of scientific inquiry into the nature of the universe – its spiritual dimensions.  I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the edge of the desktop.  I listened intently to the hard drive whirring hoping I could better discern and transcribe everything it said.

A poem that first started out as a tweet

So here is a new wrinkle in the way I've decided to play around with Twitter.  I started writing a poem as a Tweet.  And then I hit the 140 character limit and I kept going.  Oh well.  I guess this twitter poetry is a rapidly evolving form of art in which we make and break rules with abandon.  In any case, here is the poem that started out as a Tweet:

A poem may

Be nothing more  

Than a moment in time 

That brings heightened command

Over the King’s English and 

In which insight waxes greatly

(in other words, a tweet)
Only briefly to transpire

And no longer suffice

For the expression of whatever

Meaning it was that
Was initially conceived

Ode to Nothing (or a brief note jotted down while examining the vortex)

How the vortex shows
Nothing may be such an active

Presence in our lives

Like the drone of bees

Gathering around

The hive it is an

Effusion we give off

Collectively as a species

As we go about building
Out the honeycomb and preparing
For our own demise

 

The image above is by the artist Brian D. Cohen and first appeared in his book The Fools' Journey, which is filled with striking images based on Renaissance cosmography. You can learn more about Brian's great work on his website:  www.bridge-press.com 

A Note of Thanks to Francois Jullien

I jotted down these lines after first opening up the pages of a revelatory text called The Great Image Has No Form by Francois Jullien.

The ineffable remains

A frontier by rational

Intellect largely undiscovered

Reachable much more readily

Via the Arts than Sciences

Not easily susceptible to

Measurement or dismemberment

Or remembrance in daylight's glare

But in embracing it

We ourselves are subsumed