 |
TRADITION & THE INDIVISIBLE TALENT
If all the world says something
we think then we know something
don’t we and then the blank screen
or memory again. You crazy.
No, you crazy. It’s like this
but almost always
when time-lapsed words
and weather-swept flowering trees
move in empathetic wind.
I am rooted but alive.
I am flowering and dying
I am you the wind says, the wind.
The embiggened afternoon
was just getting started
and to be adrift and stuck
can be a pleasant sensation
like loving abstraction
or a particular object’s nimbus.
Pick one and look at it,
human or digital, vegetable,
mineral, alive or dying,
it’s all atomic anyhow,
much closer, the electron
part of yr being. Being,
it’s a small word.
After all absence makes
the particles move faster.
The path tilted up to the right
and the angled view
so dramatic in boisterous sun.
When a thought’s thingness begins
to move, to become unmoored,
and you ride the current
with your head and feel yourself
lift off like birdsong caught in the inner ear
even the curios seem animated
in their dusty shelves.
When the inanimate gestures back
with an imperceptible howdy
then the known sets in—
the song is alive. A scale
rendered invisibly opening onto once.
That part of tradition.
Birdsong and daybreak,
are they not the same at the root?
Twigs torn from brambles
nest and house this cooing thing.
Close your eyes. The notes
imprint their solar magic homing
a musical refrain built out
in a sculptural vortex and time
is this sculptural vortex—
the applause of rushes
sung into a larger sequence.
The sky. And now the word is fire,
fire in the heart, fire in the head.
Fire above and fire in bed—
seemingly the only element
to get gilded up in song.
How about dirt? I love you
like dirt. I miss you dirty mouth,
dirty smile, oh, and my dirt
is your dirt is nice also.
Closer to the ground, perhaps,
on the ground, that’s real enough
and those goddamn spuggies
are fledged and it’s spring
and the books in my shelves
in my head have all turned, nothing
but earth and peat and mold
and rich soft living manna
you can breathe, the must.
The must at the root of it all,
desire and wanting, must know.
