Poetry

There’s no sense

in telling you my particular

troubles. You have yours too.

Is there value

in comparing notes?

Unlike Williams writing

poems on prescription pads

between patients, I have

no prescriptions for you.

I’m more interested

in the particular

nature and tenor of the energy

of our trouble. Maybe

that’s not enough for you.

Sometimes I stick in

some music. I’m capable

of hallucination

so there’s nothing wrong

with my images. As for me,

I’m not looking for wisdom.

The wise don’t often write

wisely, do they? The danger

is in teetering into platitudes.

Maybe Keats was preternaturally

wise but what he gave us

was beauty, whatever that is,

and truth, synonymous, he wrote,

with beauty, and not the same

as wisdom. Maybe truth

is the raw material of wisdom

before it has been conformed

by ego, fear, and time,

like a shot

of whiskey without

embellishment, or truth lays bare

the broken bone and wisdom

scurries in, wanting

to cover and justify it. It’s really

kind of a nasty

enterprise. Who wants anyone

else’s hands on their pain?

And I’d rather be arrested

than advised, even on my

taxes. So what

can poetry be now? Dangerous

to approach such a question,

and difficult to find the will to care.

But we must not languish, soldiers,

(according to the wise,)

we must go so far as to invent

new mechanisms of caring.

Maybe truth, yes, delivered

with clarity. The tone is up

to you. Truth, unabridged,

has become in itself a strange

and beautiful thing.

Truth may involve a degree

of seeing through time.

Even developing a relationship

with a thing before writing,

whether a bird

or an idea about birds, it doesn’t

matter. But please not only

a picture of a bird. Err

on the side of humility, though

humility can be declarative.

It does not submit. It can even appear

audacious. It takes mettle

to propose truth

and pretend it is generalizable.

Truth should sting, in its way,

like a major bee, not a sweat bee.

It may target the reader like an arrow,

or be swallowable, a watermelon

seed we feared as children

would take up residency in our guts

and grow unabated and change us

forever into something viny

and prolific and terrible.

As for beauty, a problematic word,

one to be side-eyed lest it turn you

to stone or salt,

it is not something to work on

but a biproduct, at times,

of the process of our making.

Beauty comes or it doesn’t, as do

its equally compelling counterparts,

inelegance and vileness.

This we learned from Baudelaire,

Flaubert, Rimbaud, Genet, male poets

of the lavishly grotesque.

You’ve seen those living rooms,

the red velvet walls and lampshades

fringed gold, cat hair thick

on the couches,

and you have been weirdly

compelled, even cushioned,

by them. Either way,

please don’t tell me flowers

are beautiful and blood clots

are ugly. These things I know,

or I know this is how

flowers and blood clots

are assessed by those content

with stale orthodoxies.

Maybe there is such a thing

as the beauty of drawing near.

Near, nearer, all the way

to the bedside of the dying

world. To sit in witness,

without platitudes, no matter

the distortions of the death throes,

no matter the awful music

of the rattle. Close, closer,

to that sheeted edge.

From this vantage point

poetry can still be beautiful.

It can even be useful, though

never wise.