A poem, unlike
a living being, cannot
perceive you and, in
perceiving you, grant you
reality. If it sleeps
with you, it cuts you.
It runs a few
degrees cooler than room
temperature. A love poem
does not love you. Or
does not necessarily love
you. A love poem faces
outward. It performs
love adequately. Lately,
I’ve wondered about poetry’s
efficacy. It’s like doubting
a long romance, or romance
itself, the essence of it.
Fearsome, to doubt
your life’s foundation.
I’ve also wondered about
painting. What distinguishes
a good or great painting,
paintings I’ve loved, from
illustration? Lately everything
seems illustrative to me,
as if the whole world
is a cunning metaphor.
A young painter once
cautioned me not to bring
a literary framework to visual art.
A sane admonition, I think.
Maybe what distinguishes
art from illustration
is its uselessness. Art,
useless at its core,
but not valueless. And
what is the correlation
between painting and poetry?
What makes a poem merely
illustrative and what elevates it
to an essential artfulness,
i.e., uselessness? I know
I am using the old language
here. “Merely.” “Elevates.”
I am in an antiquated room,
its fixtures, dust-covered
and ornate. Furniture,
built at the behest of another
era, from a principle of design
that forefronts beauty,
is delicate, as if balanced on a foal’s
trembling legs. Maybe to live
within a poem is to entrap oneself
in an architecture constructed upon
outmoded theories of composition.
It’s possible there is an undiscovered
room or house, or a structure
somewhere I don’t yet have
the language for. An academy of silences.
A cathedral of cross-purposed
voices. A posthuman spaciousness
filled only with a reemerged
species of butterflies. A catacomb
of cluster flies. Whatever it will be,
it will be new, filled
with its own mystifying absurdities,
and likely beyond me.
This body may not be built
for it. Mine is the kind
of body you drag around
town on a leash, with a choke
chain. You don’t love it,
but it’s yours to contend with,
though it compresses your
soul. When did it begin
to compress rather than
liberate my soul? Early,
but I do remember
when it was my soul’s instrument,
indistinguishable from
my soul. I could sit on the front
stoop and the whole world
came streaming in through
the structures of my senses.
Maybe the body is the soul’s
metaphor. Maybe to escape it
is to escape the service
economy. To dissolve analogy.
Attain uselessness.