Black notes against a stave of sky
Earthquake Weather
I do not know the true nature of the tools I employ. Function
and purpose lie outside my uncollected knowledge, but serve
well my experience. This has always been so. I’ve been bitten
by three dogs. Language failed me each time. The instinct for
expression, however, flung me by the tail of my lizard’s brain.
I cannot deconstruct the black marks I make. I drift between
sum parts and total. Poetry arrived within me via panspermia
from nether regions whose emptinesses hold every secret thing
that bullets forth from the unconscious tumble of milk and dumb
iron. Such is the evolution of praise for a mountain wildflower.
As the mechanism of a mouth remains unspoken in its symmetry, so the issue of black ink affirms itself as proof. This is a language poem. I had never heard the term prior to the day before yesterday, which, like this school of idiomaxia, never existed. Take my words for it: Wednesday happened. It was hot and
humid, crows peppered the tops of tapered Italian cypress forming black notes against an unsung stave of sky. I breathed and ate, rested and wrote, blinked out the window through earthquake weather while a pulse throbbed griding across the stone of my skull. My calendar does not concur. It displays only one day,
this day, and all other squares remain blank. If the first lie of the Devil was tomorrow, then God’s first was yesterday. Few claim what lies between so I will make it my lie. I give it now to you. Do what you wish with it. Starve it, sell it, worship it. I do not care. It is yours. This poem is failing badly. I do not know enough to
emulate or ensummon. But it is not yet done with me. We go on. It is morning in California and the sun sacrifices itself. It pushes hydrogen and madness through the same pores and in this manner photosynthesis builds its temple. This will go on all day. I am not required to have faith or one misbelief in this. Messiahs may
germinate among its tenets and tendrils, beings hampered by the atomic weight of halos, carrying rich nutrient beneath the antway of a world desurrected. Technology has learned this simple trick of divinity, carries voices from behind clouds through wires we live in dread of touching. Continents thrum darker for this very
reason. Nothing is miraculous. Everything is common in the testament of its expression. Translated from impossible blood, I am a toxic bible—a good word struck daily from obelisks; a miswoven reed of irrelevance. This is how that most visible part of me came to be savior—a lost and loving underlord.
Joseph Gallo
June 30, 2006
I do not know the true nature of the tools I employ. Function
and purpose lie outside my uncollected knowledge, but serve
well my experience. This has always been so. I’ve been bitten
by three dogs. Language failed me each time. The instinct for
expression, however, flung me by the tail of my lizard’s brain.
I cannot deconstruct the black marks I make. I drift between
sum parts and total. Poetry arrived within me via panspermia
from nether regions whose emptinesses hold every secret thing
that bullets forth from the unconscious tumble of milk and dumb
iron. Such is the evolution of praise for a mountain wildflower.
As the mechanism of a mouth remains unspoken in its symmetry, so the issue of black ink affirms itself as proof. This is a language poem. I had never heard the term prior to the day before yesterday, which, like this school of idiomaxia, never existed. Take my words for it: Wednesday happened. It was hot and
humid, crows peppered the tops of tapered Italian cypress forming black notes against an unsung stave of sky. I breathed and ate, rested and wrote, blinked out the window through earthquake weather while a pulse throbbed griding across the stone of my skull. My calendar does not concur. It displays only one day,
this day, and all other squares remain blank. If the first lie of the Devil was tomorrow, then God’s first was yesterday. Few claim what lies between so I will make it my lie. I give it now to you. Do what you wish with it. Starve it, sell it, worship it. I do not care. It is yours. This poem is failing badly. I do not know enough to
emulate or ensummon. But it is not yet done with me. We go on. It is morning in California and the sun sacrifices itself. It pushes hydrogen and madness through the same pores and in this manner photosynthesis builds its temple. This will go on all day. I am not required to have faith or one misbelief in this. Messiahs may
germinate among its tenets and tendrils, beings hampered by the atomic weight of halos, carrying rich nutrient beneath the antway of a world desurrected. Technology has learned this simple trick of divinity, carries voices from behind clouds through wires we live in dread of touching. Continents thrum darker for this very
reason. Nothing is miraculous. Everything is common in the testament of its expression. Translated from impossible blood, I am a toxic bible—a good word struck daily from obelisks; a miswoven reed of irrelevance. This is how that most visible part of me came to be savior—a lost and loving underlord.
Joseph Gallo
June 30, 2006
post-time 9:02 PM
6 Comments:
Joseph,
Forgive me for not replying in kind - I'm no poet - no artist, truly, of any stripe, actually - too much of the persistently parsing plodder in my blood I'm afraid but I do know art when I see/hear/read/ingest it - and I DO SO APPRECIATE authenticity, genuineness [[didn't Robert Pirsig plow this furrow into the dirt? Oh, yeah, he was talking about "Quality" - yeah, I know it's not the same thing]] - at least by my own lights - and dare I say?: You evoke it effortlessly, exceptionally. Kudos.
BTW, do you like Alejandro González Iñárritu? I think his film BABEL is a two hour twenty-two minute poem in celluloid! Amazing soundtrack is just one of the perks of being in front of the screen. I'm thinking of plunking down another $9.50 tonight just to luxuriate in it again.
John
This is a good read, Joseph. Thanks.
If the first lie of the Devil was tomorrow, then God’s first was yesterday. Few claim what lies between so I will make it my lie. I give it now to you.
Give me this day.
This one moment
in completeness.
And I will give
you all that I am.
Lovely, Joseph.
John: Saw Babel last week. Yes, it had moments of pure poetry. The story of the mute Japanese girl was particularly mesmerizing. Thanks for your recommendation as it became a catalyst.
Sophie: Thank you for your kind words and for taking the time to say so. :-)
Joni: This day is the only gift we ever truly hold. It is the ghost of a slippery fish. It always wriggles away and we are left to ponder its brevity.
:cheesygrin: ... your remark to Joni reminds me of this Taoist saying:
No one lives longer than a child who dies young, and the seven-hundred-year-old Peng Tsu died an infant. (Chuang Tzu, 26).
Lao-Zi: I should have added that if we are fast and wise, we should eat the slippery ghost before it wriggles off, thereby extending the brevity by indigestion. Thanks for that cheesygrin too---it goes well with fish.
Post a Comment
<< Home