Words for Empty and Words for Full

Shorn

49 Shorn Morning. The usual crows. The usual undulating line of Paris mountain coming out of the dark or into light, take your pick. I’m writing about the shootings again. I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to write about writing again, but the mind, shorn of object— object of the poem, object of the bullet—doesn’t exist. It’s the choice of object I wonder how people make, why some words are enough in how they almost don’t fail, why some minds, like all minds, are never seen, but their invisibility requires the extension of invisibility, the extinction of the day as it would be. With me in or out of it, this day will be itself. I want to be in it, Cho wanted to be so deep in time that we can never get him out. This is what I’m saying: I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m saying the hero cop was smart, determined, pretty on TV last night. She and her men went after a sniper, a boy who’d shot several people from the roof of a mall, circles of blood on their chests, backs, reminding me of daubs of paint, pointillist deaths, maybe. We were never told if they lived or died, the people were props, he was stopped, the boy, after she—still smart, determined, pretty—said, “shoot the bag,” meaning the bag of pipe-bombs at his feet, and they did, and he exploded. “Columbine” was mentioned but not Virginia Tech. We were happy about that, brushed our teeth, went to bed. Morning. The usual wondering how one thing signifies another, where is the pure instance of mind, of me, of crow, going on about, what is it that crows go on about? I had it hicok pages i-120.indd 49 1/7/10 3:23 PM 50 a moment ago, a sense that I could see through time and language, through my face, the mountain, through the caws of crows to what abides within loss other than waste, injury, harm, like a painting of a battle that has a painting underneath. Eyes looking up, out, at what the painting can’t hold, wasn’t asked to, taking our eyes away from a woman we don’t want to turn away from, as if she knew, or the artist, or beauty itself needed to tell us that below death, below anything, there’s nothing to see but the feeling that we can see. Here you might recognize language as one of the ways to end a poem. Pretend you treat it as I do now; a menu of sticks, a blaze I keep asking to be my body, a clock. hicok pages i-120.indd 50 1/7/10 3:23 PM hicok pages i-120.indd 51 1/7/10 3:23 PM hicok pages i-120.indd 52 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...