The Poetry of Ellipsis

What’s forgotten

And left unsaid

Defines a poem

Inside my head

Of the very purest kind

It's the poetry of ellipsis

Composed of words

That slipped away

Before I found the time

To scribble them down

But who can see and savor

What's on display inside
The museum of forgetting

Who can hear the holy bells

That peal without a sound

Or pay homage to the relics

Lost amidst the landscape

Of forever shifting clouds

*******************

Last night I spoke with Allan for the first time.  Actually, it wasn’t much of a conversation.  We stood on a mountain top.  Marissa was there too, standing off to the side.  I was looking down at a sea of clouds – a beautiful ever-changing field of display.  I noticed one cloud in particular that looked so painterly; strangely it was the cloud’s interior space that defined the image, while the cloud’s exterior served as the picture frame.  An image emerged within that was defined by the negative space, where the cloud gave way and we could see only blue sky.  It was shifting about, like a Keith Haring figure, dancing, arms and legs undulating to the rhythm of wind and sky; somehow it managed to be both a still life composed of the deep blue sky and yet fully animated as the cloud continually transformed.

I wanted to point out this masterpiece to Allan, hoping to impress him with my artistic sensibility.  But I found myself tongue-tied.  I couldn’t remember Keith Haring’s name.  All I could come up with was Jean-Michel Basquiat and then, while I struggled with name recall, the image altogether disappeared.  And then I woke up and wrote this poem.  What's forgotten/ and left unsaid/ defines a poem/ inside my head ...

  (For those of you wondering who Allan is – he was my wife’s first husband, a brilliant artist I never had the chance to meet.  Marissa and I are now working on a podcast to tell the story of Allan and the Apology Line, the conceptual art project that was the masterwork to which he devoted the last 15 years of his life.  You can read more about Allan and his work  on my Apology Line blog.)   

In the Empire of Rustling Leaves

for Diane Seuss

Here close to the center

Of the known world

I administer to an empire

Of rustling leaves

The world is wordless 

But far from silent

Alive with the music of things

The arpeggio of wind as it

Plays up and down the trunks

Of nearby oaks and elms

All the while conducted

By some sightless being

Of each acorn drop

The squirrels duly take note

Nature abhors nothing

Not even a vacuum

But chooses rather to fill it

With a harmony of

Ceaseless pings

Birds are not not-birds

Except when they tweet

Silence offers nothing but

Always comes complete

And the great awakening  

Is really no awakening at all

For although mind may be stilled

The world itself keeps singing

(not sure of the source of this great photo)

For @vchangpoet

There are no best poems
There never were and
Never will be yet
Only those that linger longest and
Which we are least likely to forget
Poetry being merely a mnemonic
So that spirit may outlive the flesh

A funny thing about this poem fragment - I composed and sent it as a tweet to the poet Victoria Chang in response to something she had posted (a quote from someone else I think) about how there are no longer any "best poems" due to the democratization of American poetry. Her response was to promptly block me from her Twitter account.

How strange but this is a problem that continues to dog me when I brush up against the world of more established poets -- how quickly they seem to take offense. Elsewhere I've called this my Don Share problem for he was the first luminary of the poetry establishment to block me from reading his tweets. So much for the democratic, free and open exchange of ideas and verse! In any case, it certainly diminishes the likelihood of remembering a poem when you have chosen to block it from view in the first place.