M A R K   D O W
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TWO POEMS

 

 

Dear Jim Comma

 

 

For me the longed-for, personnel aside, is this:

that I could render in discrete words each thing I see full stop.

I can't. And so I leave them out and only now admit

in black and white my underpopulated so-called poems

are chat-charts of evasions of this longing's falling flat.

Something tells me I once told you this, disguised,

by claiming words are wasted on and inadequate to

what our eyes can plainly see. The truth, I soothed

myself, is poems should articulate the inner states

misstated to both others and ourselves with unfit names.

But I want it to be something else too, a sketch

of the contours of all I inhabit, by echolocation,

of the being here less and more at the same time

if you get me. All I really want to do is sit and look

at things. Isn't that what they're for, after all, or we are?

I lied. I also want you to hear the instruments talking to each other,

insistently even, to stay afloat, there is that fear, yes, but

floating, either way, suspended, can he do this, bathed even, as if

the southwest summer twilight that for just a long moment's forever

and comes right up and all around to one, like the so-called

emptiness does, as if to float one or to memorize

the features that it sees and all that time

you thought you were the one doing the looking.

Me, I'm still at the halfway mark, one foot in the dark,

only this emissary of me able to unfold along the front

where will and surrender are trying to be one without

being trying and trying to give up oneself without selfing

where they can be seen against the shift change afternoon sky

from some distance approaching, building themselves up,

blue-grey-bottomed, dense white condensed into light

thick and insubstantial, eventually to rain down

somewhere the rain will rain but where, El Paso,

Pasadena, oh I don't know, but I know I can risk it

and thrill in the possible of falling flat or flailing

so long as I know that some plain man somewhere's

listing toward me and taking it, taking my taking it to him,

letting me listen to him letting himself listen to me

and be taken in out there, time permitting and all.

                                                                                   for James McMichael                                                                                  

                                                                                 

 

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