It’s that time,

again.

A Convention of Fiction after Louise Glück

Con/Jur/d 10/12/2020

“... as if in the middle of a long, long
conversation.”
“Mine too.
Terminally they point to,
transcribing, if you will,
the sound of beginning.”
“And after.”
“Yes. It’s why certain poems
leave me bare, I’m unable to read
or hear another?”
“Because of,‘culturally conditioned fear.’
Nakedness -- sorry.
sometimes, I say things I don’t mean.”
“Me too,” I said.

For a while then,
we look: The circular lake.
with its assortment of many-hued swim tubes,
ill-defined, as if the artist wandered off mid-brushstroke,
children, their frenetic motions echoing like a bird’s trill,
“Youth, yooth, yooth, you-you-thhhh” rippling across
midnight cold waters - Somehow you know:

At depth, beneath:
Bubbles become a clock’s tick-tock;
the bottom is hidden beneath wreckage,
of what passes. A sodden heap. A final port.
Swords, seaweed, and hands entwined
With vague lengthless tendrils, one
touches your foot, causing an initiatory
shock -- even now a fresh drunk cup,
still, damp from tea can startle.

Deeper still:
a dark-dark fullness
as if everything, everywhen, overflows
transgresses every known boundary,
and still, it flows. A depth and a dark
so deep and so empty, all light, all absence
all pain, all suffering, even the all implicit in every,
drowns. The center, circumference, and rim
equal in a pressing, smothering,
obliterating equanimity.

The wave breaks. We breathe. We rise up.

There! There! The universal solvent,
the infernal corrosive has revealed,
at last: every loss, every love, every life
glittering beneath the Sun and the Moon
and the Stars, all reflection and essence
of what is. All burning,
all one and the same,
yet different.

The Firmament.
Above. Below.

I say, “ My favorite poems, although I sometimes,
refer to them as a little “Denial of Death”, after Louise Glück
begin and end as if in the middle
of a long, long conversation.”

“Me too,” you said,
which I believe. is a convention
of fiction.

I have a photo-poem cooking, with words ‘borrowed’ from Erik Davis’s “High Weirdness” which may be ready as soon as tomorrow. I… oops, smell something burning on the stove, see y’all soon! Con/Jur/d