poetry notebook

[Early sketch of longer sub-subject that will itself be expanded and modified even though it's part of a large thought that will take weeks if not months. Not an apology for quality, but an indication that it will grow in content.]

It was always about knowing,

wasn’t it? Those first days

with Mammy holding you the

night a man came to the house

and everyone was excited –

you wanted to know what this

was all about (dad just home

from a tour of duty) and from then on

always just wanting to know

to know if repeatedly throwing a “shockproof”

watch against a brick wall would break it. You

surmised that, if it was shockproof

it wouldn’t break. When it broke,

around the time they killed John Kennedy

with rockets taking off, it was an

abysmal disappointment almost as

deep as when, the house after

the frozen river flooded the previous house,

a rented house with a swinging chair

on the front porch (what were you, 3?)

and you all came home from visiting

Mammy and Pop-pop, the first thing you noticed

was that the porch swing loveseat was gone.

Your father explained that it was owned

by the people who owned the house

and they took it because they decided

that they wanted it.

Imipolex told me that you told

him that from one moment, riding in the

back seat of a station wagon,

passing a train just

off to the left and a

tractor-trailer to the right

on a 2-lane road, you were

transfixed by thoughts

of where the components of the door

came from, how they were made, how

assembled, mined, smelted.

Refineries and factories were

mysterious omphaloi of the country.

You decided that you wanted to know.

But what was it that you wanted to know?

Do you remember?

He also said what it was

morphed decade to decade,

blended with new information

and new needs: to understand,

to directly experience, the lives of

others more and more, from early on

knowing how privileged you were, wanting

to know how those less well placed felt,

to look into the things that

enslave people and also to become free

of those things; to know hopelessness

for the future, to be trapped

in a social stratum, not to know,

not to believe, that there would ever be

an escape — to know it would require

becoming it. Nothing short of that would do.

And nothing short of getting out

of that would do to realize

how to get out of it.

Possibly you simply lacked imagination.

But no, really, it was

a form of imagination, one directed

outward, believing that there’s actually

somewhere to go, something to see

some way to be

that could exceed in beauty

and intensity

a direct encounter

with your own mind.