ars poetica

Rehearsal in Black

 

The science of the irrational,

poetry knows what time is feeling

in the language we speak. Casual

 

as a crow above the pealing

tower, it circles our point of view

with applied indifference. The ceiling

 

is the limit only in the room;

love is torn between two sheets;

animals eat each other. Truth

 

is another order, beyond the heat

of sense. The memory of language

is a blind cold wall, a sweet

 

old man carrying a doll, pages

of silence framed by the chase.

What is love’s name in an age

 

of skin? Everything you face

is just as it happened, minus all

the details. You write a line a day,

 

whether bad or good, then fall

into a stupor. A line of black cars

arrives at the horizon. In the fall,

 

you’ve noticed, the fattest stars

get even fatter. Maybe it’s the air,

sodden with nostalgia. We are

 

what we are, a kind of rare

poison steeped in a kiss. Roots,

reeds, fish, the broken river—

 

everything is perfectly suited

for a local drowning. Here’s a shot

of the water surface, with its mute

 

tensions and the struggle not

to fold. The world, dispersing,

turns. Here’s the face of a god

 

no one remembers, in the church

of words. The American laugh,

said Jung, is urgent as a thirst.

 

It bowls you over with its raffish

humor and grabs you by the balls.

You can see the diver’s glove, half-

 

filled with blood, in the halls

of that museum, where nothing

finally matters but stands as tall

 

as it can. Life is always touching

the edges of a net. Light enters water,

and that is called perspective. Such ends

 

are met when language and space, neither

quite sufficient, negotiate a realm.

It’s cold inside, children have no fathers,

 

and mothers are desperate to tell

of love. It’s a landfill country, strewn

with cast-off things, where stone bells

 

ring and drowned boats rise. The truth

is confused but strikes for the prize:

the stone floor of the sea, red tooth

 

of existence, and what the eyes deny.

You descend the stairs to hell, walk

its plazas and parks, and manage to find

 

a date for the evening. She talks

of her desires, but this is not desire;

it’s the tender mercy of a leaf’s awkward

 

falling. At what firm margin, the fires

in the mirror or in your eyes, is love

to be found? Does the sea aspire

 

to be just water? In the weave of

your intentions, the air plays the air.

Nothing is nothing. In a coven

 

of mechanics, in the scariest

Hollywood mansion, love is the prize

and a touch of the fever. Rare

 

as existence, it has seen the mind

change the most desolate landscapes

into quiet rooms. It always finds

 

the world in absence, doors taped

shut. This is like the movies, a black

room filled with murmurs. As the drapes

 

are pulled, you see from the back

life’s enormous figures falling in

and out of focus, a final slackness

 

of being we later enjoy enduring.

The story is stained with its own

rehearsal. A handsome bed is burning.

 

Serious and alluring, a long dial tone

passes for conversation. No one’s

there but you, talking into the phone

 

like a younger father to an older son.

 

—Paul Hoover

____

from Rehearsal in Black (Salt Editions, 2001)

Poetics

 

I have no objectives, no system, no tendency, and no plan.

I have no speech, no tongue, no memory, and no realm.

Because nothing matters, I am consistent, committed, and excited.

I prefer the definite, the bounded, the repressed and the weak.

Not objectivity but neutrality of being.

Not spontaneity but panic.

For only seeing believes and only the body thinks.

For success is common to those who fail.

For the world’s beauty is fading because the world is fading.

For the best narrative is always oblique.

For thought only thinks it thinks—all has been foretold.

For without cruelty, there would be no beauty.

For kindness is always a little bit tragic.

For the mind’s progress is zig-zag and stabs at every tree.

For the best art makes things disappear.

 

—Paul Hoover

____

from Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005)