Meditation 26

[I don't like this one much, but the discipline is where it's at. Will probably not survive blog-status in the end, however.But when I put it here and fuss with it, there's improvement! The beauty of error.]

3/3/2020

His mistake was to make himself the poem. Easier to collage with a knife or digital razor, tracing the skin’s edge, cutting himself like the newly pardoned governor, whose hair turned white in prison. Not used to the razors yet, he said, dabbing his face with white cloth. If we’re the poem, we really are laid out upon a table. The table is for surgery or for dinner, for numbness or conversation. It could be both, but that’s a crime. Men are killed in prison for that. One student says he has a question unrelated to our discussion. “What’s a poem?” he says. What do you do, asks another, with the fact that one poem has a tight structure, and other lacks one? “What’s the line?” they want to know. They’re my students who talk about the stock market; one tells me it doesn’t matter if it crashes now, he’s got 15 years to wait it out. The market’s our cardiogram, tracing the hills and valleys of an 

empire’s vital signs. The president, we’re told, is deeply engaged; he asks about the market all the 

time. That we can believe. Lilith’s spiky ball is a corona virus, a plastic sun awakening in spikes of orange light. Mountains were layer cakes this morning: blue, white, green descending to the mottled leaves within my line of sight. I do not work in lines, but cuts run deep as rivers between them.