In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

Tradition & the Indivisible Talent

195 T R A D I T I O N & T H E I N D I V I S I B L E TA L E N T If all the world says something we think then we know something don’t we? And then the blank screen or memory again. You crazy. No, you crazy. It’s like this but almost always when time-lapsed words and weather-swept flowering trees move in empathetic wind. I am rooted but alive. I am flowering and dying. I am you the wind says, the wind. The embiggened afternoon was just getting started and to be adrift and stuck can be a pleasant sensation 196 like loving abstraction or a particular object’s nimbus. Pick one and look at it, human or digital, vegetable, mineral, alive or dying, it’s all atomic anyhow much closer, the electron part of being. Being, it’s a small word. After all absence makes the particles move faster. The path tilted up to the right and the angled view so dramatic in boisterous sun. When a thought’s thingness begins to move, to become unmoored and you ride the current with your head, feel yourself lift off like birdsong caught in the inner ear even the curios seem animated in their dusty shelves— the song is alive. That part of tradition. 197 Birdsong and daybreak, are they not the same at the root? Twigs torn from brambles nest and house this cooing thing. Close your eyes. The notes imprint their solar magic homing a musical refrain built out in a sculptural vortex— the applause of rushes sung into a larger sequence. The sky. And now the word is fire, fire in the heart, fire in the head. Fire above and fire in bed— seemingly the only element to get gilded up in song. How about dirt? I love you like dirt. I miss you dirty mouth, dirty smile, oh, and my dirt is your dirt is nice also. Closer to the ground, perhaps, on the ground, that’s real enough and those goddamn spuggies are fledged and it’s spring and the books in my shelves 198 in my head have all turned. Nothing but earth and peat and mold and rich soft living manna you can breathe. The must at the root of it all, desire and wanting, must know. ...