poetry notebook

This time it is without indirection, without hidden mediation, without secret argumentation, that writing is proposed, presented, and asserted as a pharmakon.

~Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson

1.

That you’ve been so close to death

so many times

have always been so close

(so many died) 

have always been aware of your own death

and many times have wanted it 

have always known the end was just

around a corner, or in the sky, or in a fault

line in some artery or organ, or necrosis

or a bullet or crash or even your own hand

with some kind of drug seeking lethe;

that you have always felt death close

despite interminable situations and

dreary forcasts of deprivation when you

gave up this or that, 

projected its absence

into futurity you never expected 

to have, surprised by every date 

to still be here, to still seem to have

a future and a past, no more than before, 

no better, no worse, merely older

doesn’t contradict the fact that each 

day you feel death shine a brighter

light upon your shabby legacy 

amped up, clinical, uncompromising

as the memory of a broken tooth

a moment after, the fact that you

can’t do all you haven’t done

or undo a single thing you have.

Have you always felt important

to someone, even if only to yourself? 

How does it feel 

to know that very quickly, despite

a handful of mourners, you’ll 

pass from “men’s” memory so that

even you will no longer

remember you?

Can you hide from this?

Can you change it?

Should you? even if you could?

2.

There were angles and shadows 

and dreams

caught at the tip of a tongue

a vision just out of reach

(“what was that vision?

hold on!” holding up a finger 

“Let me try to 

remember it… 

glass eyes, long gaze,

Shhh…”)

wandering within worlds of writing

and type taking place more immediately

than speech at times, reflections disipated 

in meters per second of flow 

and the actual cubic meters per hour

of the air itself upon it.

Music has risen, 

procreated 

where beaches once 

touched water from the side,

not lying under,

and laughter and simple

pleasure at being together 

were disbursed to 

and deposited back by 

woods and campfires and rivers and rocks

a touching much warmer than this 

Christmas afternoon at a chorus 

of water on stone by the redwood, 

not plane, tree. 

Whom did I hear, speaking, 

at this river? It’s not the Illius, 

it’s the Eel. It seems that Socrates

has left us and even Plato, who wrote

what he “said,” but here, shaking a bit,

remembering the names of Socrates

and Plato and Aristotle and even 

Ezra Pound and Ronald Johnson 

don’t remember them but impressions 

of them from written words

in the brisk as I write, a bird I 

can’t identify speaks to the assembled

crowd of river voices, trees, stones and me.

If you had been there with me,

you would have heard it, unless

you’d gone deaf, in which case

you’d have felt it.