The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit is what exits from the wound it documents. The wound is deaf to what it makes; is deaf to exit and to all, and that is its durable self, to be a mayhem that torments a city. The sound comes first and then the word like a wave lightning and then thunder, a glance then a kiss follows and destroys the footprint, mark of the source. It is the source that makes the wound, the wound that makes a poem. It is defeat that makes a poem sing of the light and that means to sing for a while. The soldier leans on his spear. He sings a song of leaning; he leans on a wound to sing of other things. Names appear on a page gentian weeds that talk to gentian words, oral to local, song talk to sing (Singh), and so he goes on with the leaning and the talking. The wound lets him take a breath for a little because it is a cycle of sorts, a system or a wheel a circle that becomes a wheel and is not a sound at all, the idea of a sound and the sound again of an idea that follows so close; say light and then is there light or a wound, an idea of being itself in the thing sound cancels. Is there ever a spear a soldier that leans in, a song that he sings waiting for a battle? This soldier is only a doorway. Say that book is a door. I say the soldier and the local, the word and the weed, the light and the kiss make a mayhem and a meeting. So then that the voice may traverse a field it transmits the soldier on a causeway to the city leaning on a spear and talking, just after the wound opens that never creaks and closes, and has no final page.
From Entrepôt by Mark McMorris. Copyright © 2010 by Mark McMorris. Used by permission of Coffee House Press. All rights reserved.