This White Unswaying Place
I want to rewrite this poem and mail it to every moment I’ve procrastinated over this month.
This White Unswaying Place
I’m sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone’s old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply gleaming.
How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.
Yup. Emptiness is large. Sometimes I think it would be fun to build a nest out
of random, cut-up words from magazines and newspapers. The DNA of ransom notes.
Then, when I needed — or felt I needed — to say something, I could just
roll around for a bit and whatever words stuck to me… that’s what I’d say.
Or maybe they’d rub off on me as I slept; chaotic, temporary tattoos. You’d
ask me, “How are you?” and I’d show you my hip or my calf and ask back,
“You tell me.”
Comment by Andy — May 28, 2007 @ 10:31 pm
Lol, right, see the post immediately before this one.
But I liked something in this, the way it talks about being stuck in a blank space, a cavity, a threshold, on the verge of… the way it feels when you’ve stared at a blank white space for 1.5 milliseconds too long and whatever you were planning on saying vanishes into the ether.
But would you be familiar with that feeling, anyway? You who always have something to say?
Comment by Administrator — July 3, 2007 @ 11:08 pm