August 08, 2007

Anti-Anatomical Conclusion, or

Stealing the Trespass from the Thief

 

 

 

An ending is an alias. The poem goes on, in disguise, elsewhere.

 

But that change of guise or gait often seems painful and awkward.

The culprit is anything but elusive. She stumbles at the portal of the

next poem, the 'new' one. And can't get in without damaging

its architecture, anatomy.

 

 

Or

 

 

making the poem might require stealth. Coming or going.

And given the sometime circularity of the word, of the a.k.a.,

it's just as well to grant the interchangeable quality of beginning

and ending.

 

 

Say the poem is a form, albeit a moving, animate one.

A generative structure in not determinative.

 

No consistent fingerprint.

 

Or say that the poem's costuming is only suggestive of identity and

some kind of lung and gristle flail underneath with a volition all

their own.

 

*

 

The spectral ends of continuity get damaged, bruised, and this is

the poem's basis. The bruise says: I'm alive; blood has flowed

through this channel.

 

            (At a recent appointment, my physical therapist began kneading my

                thigh in an excruciatingly painful way. "This is not relaxing my muscle,"

                I gasped. "Oh no," he replied, "this is called traumatic massage." The idea

                is, almost, to do damage. Bruising the muscle brings in blood, which, it is

                hoped, will soften, make more fluid, the rigid fibers.)

 

 

To display the bruise is not to delimit the vigor

of the poem. It only exposes a part of the limb that extends indefinitely

from the hem of the garment. Blood once flowed here. And still

does, in traceries no one deigns to specify.

 

*

 

One might pick a lock and that's a way to blur the doorway's sense of

exterior and interior. Some one is breathing, there, in unsecured space.

Pursuing the free movement of air through these passages,

while the air, without remark, generates

itself. Lung's moist repetition.

 

*

 

If a poem were to have a 'heart,' the mechanism against conclusion

would be in place: poem as circulatory system. Boundaries are vaguely

decorative in relation to a nearly endless movement.

 

The name of a particular word, its enunciatory title: lub-dub's ironic

and happy irrelevance.

 

 

—Elizabeth Robinson

Posted by dwaber at 04:36 PM