16 December 2023

He wants a photograph of water that looks like water; it can have objects in it, too. Mud bubbles are too abstract for the work contained inside its covers, pure poetry that carries polluted water, trash beached on the banks of the Charles. "Love that dirty water" transposes nicely to other locales. I have those, but must needs divorce them from the tropics; he slings a metaphor, but not a palm. What comes between me and bird song (listening six seconds a day being good for your mental health) is an incessant drip of water beside the rhapus palm. It’s the opening to a song that gets more complicated when other instruments enter: doves, a shama thrush, fake train whistles blown on a nearby highway. Objects we miss replaced by their sounds, a wailing without origin, ticking without numbers. Cry from a mosque without the mosque; white flag waved without effect. Once in a kill zone, you’re assumed to wield false symbols, not true. Your white flag is red, so we shoot you.

It all comes back to this, or that, in which this or that stand in for conflict. You’d think you’d need two syllables to convey conflict, nested inside a single unhappy word, like conflict. Inflict with a con in front of it. A rare form of intelligence comes with wordplay, more common ones lose me, like logic puzzles, or crosswords. Cross words, not crosses. A construction worker in emergency green vest asked his buddy if the jewelry at the mall included crosses. Compassion is not a con, unless it be a form of contamination without the pollution. Viral kindness. Take that word and swing it like a small child, around and around in air, gathering dizziness like dust until the child mirrors another in the war zone. But you have running water, the better to clean up, erase the erasure of features. Our television cries: children wail, men scream. The pulse of our time, before it bleeds out.

Poems not about the burning world line up beside the playground. The blacktop’s been removed for a softer surface; it’s important to fend off law suits. The poet threatened to sue my press, which had no assets except copies of his own book he refused to buy. My soft landing came later, when solitude proved to be communal, sequence of abuses we gather together like marbles, each shining oddly in the light. What happens to poems when there’s no content left, only containers open to the rain (which has now stopped, the drum beat of a drop quieting)? The sound of thought without thinking, or the thinking of thoughts that are only sound. Stop several times a day to listen; it’s good for your mental health.

Give me a rule-bound wisdom whose tenets I can break, like stick sculptures on a beach. Once I have my photograph, no one can destroy my monuments. Memory is formaldehyde, and though it smells strong, it can remind us of orchids. I live between the mountains and the sea, but that chant is for others to misinterpret. It’s either liberatory or genocidal, and we hope it’s not both. The rules of grammar are no help with such as these. A slogan is usually strong grammar, incomplete thought. Certainty, authority separate from content. Rain barrel at the edge, rimmed with weeds. Broken faucet a disneyland for exiles.