An almost hallucinatory presence: mist rolls off the roof, a murmuration of light between us and the ferns. It is movement that doesn’t hurt, unlike scrolling through images apparently not disturbing enough to hide. A fellow academic and I talked about the damage incurred at our workplaces, the signals sent silently that you must yourself be muted (and not by accident). The fear painted on the sides of corridors so that walking to class borders on imageless nightmare. Fear’s affect is more frightening than its content. I can be scared of a bear in the woods, but still feeling afraid without seeing him is more frightful yet. Shunning is all question without answers. You wonder why you inhabit others’ silences; their not saying why is part of the plan. So long as you’re afflicted, you’re safe.
There’s someone in every workplace who’s gifted with cruelty. The rest of us would have to work at it, sometimes happen upon it, but Cruel Royalty has its protocols. Silence would seem to protect us from tragic certainty; we who are afraid still do not want the spell undone. We might climb on Icarus’s back, the way a tourist mounts a baby whale in distress, and witness the fall in making it. Distress brings us closer, even as it’s delivered by one and the other is obliged to accept. Eventually, the sea takes us in.
I advise a student
not to make abstract statements, but to ground them in the clarity of
objects. Neither she nor I are Simone Weil, pursuing her abstractions
until history breaks on them, like glass on tile, thoughts so real
they sound. (Which is glass and which is tile I leave to you.) My take
on this student is that she’s a lyric poet in a
world that can’t sustain lyricism. Don't try to return to the
beginning of the poem as it ends, because that beginning is now gone.
Poetry extinction has to do with more than time’s dissolution. It’s
hard to dissolve when you know bombs are falling somewhere. The poem
will not sing us to its end, but push us off its shelf. Black lava
surrenders to blue water. I answer my student’s butt call by wishing her a happy new year--
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