TWO POEMS
Mausoleum H
Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my short poem, the one no one readsabout the dead icon, written when he was alive.Technical difficulties aren’t our only betrayal,my friend. Beyond gesture of stylehe was a poet of praise, muchmore so than one of pleasure’ssheer virtuosity. Over the arc, plenty of the latterdecoupled from our addictionto meaning, our methods of extraction,drilling exegetical, fracking logical, historicalwhen all the world’s asleep.The case for nonsense was madeby Dr. Seuss and the mathematician who said any roadwill take you there. Razors and red herrings,the air of sui generis, and the pluripotencyof stem cells aside, our departed’s song,more than a century later, is the truest heir to Whitman(one of at least two from whom a poet must descend,with allowance for the cost of the localmarket, as my flood adjustor explained).Suffice it to say his praise was anti-Oedipalin its piston (and whether you’re monoglotor provincial, our poet loved him some French):not clinical, metaphysical, or existential,but amalgam, amalgam and yet and yetthe red-hot iron, we oedipalized himand he didn’t necessarily object.He was elegiac as well and had youlaughing at the one thing that can, could, and didshine brighter. A national poet,a unifier in chief we often ascribe to distant others,and he, if anything, wasn’t political.Still I neglect a simpler possibilitythat neuroscience might one dayilluminate: how a language like his is composedin an encephalon we aren’t currently able to surveyto our satisfaction. All that translation he foundin hyperlinked citizen moths. This, too,is where he got us pirouetting on scoriawith soles that don’t burn.Always the occasional dictionary,and what is language, he said,if not a summation of times pastin the present glossal.On the edge of permissible consciousnesswe are tethered ancient,and diagnosis is our borderland,our levee, our mark. Perhaps none, noneof this we’ll remember when the next hurricaneswings around.Only that we were more better, more fun.
