I recently picked up Roo Borson’s Personal History, a beautiful collection of essays about poetry and art. One of the pleasure’s of this book is Borson’s knack for gorgeously phrasing powerful ideas. For instance: And there is nourishment in the notion that all books, in all languages, throughout history, form a linked, extended work – like the parlour game in which everyone in the room adds a different stanza to a freely evolving poem – a linked, extended work which, while perhaps not a masterpiece, is surely an epic of sorts.
My addition to the non-masterpiece side of this epic is a poem that I just wrote this afternoon. What sets this piece apart from what I usually write are the conditions under which it was created. For about two hours this afternoon I listened to nothing but John Ashbery‘s Soonest Mended on repeat on my iPhone as I went about my afternoon chores. When I got back home, I pressed stop and wrote down the following:
Wind, cherry blossom petals and sporadic raindrops
are the constant elements to this day,
swirling in a luminescent tunnel upon which scenes are painted:
backed up traffic stretching out towards perspective of a pin point
and then a lotto center with chairs and tables, bending and scratching.
Wilfred Laurier on a five spot with feather-like wisps of hair by his ear,
whorls across his face as if it were his thumb print fat and flat
and the reason he made prime minister was that he was the first
person with such strangeness attached to an extremity,
and we were happy to elect someone with such an honest touch.
But the street scene painted again by Ashbery’s bland voice
taking a stroke out of Anger or some landscape artist from Italy
and we’re in Rio Friendly Meats were they are.
You bite into a pepperoni stick that might be the winner
might open to that two hundred dollar scratch and win payoff
but it’s just a willy wonka kind of thought injected into meat,
and the grocery store gets a tener with Macdonald in exchange
for milk and bread and I see something in the future in the cash
display as an electronic opening to watch dreams of future
purchase highlights and I smile and Ashbery tells me that
“not to grow up is the best kind of maturity at this juncture”.
On walk home I see cherry blossom petals on man’s face;
he pulls up jeans at the waist to show that he’s more,
and in the distance of the sidewalk cherry blossom blottoed
people and behind the dumpster man pisses out cherry blossoms
and the tunnel that’s painted around me shrinks to cigar
sized pepperoni stogie in my mouth and I’ve solved the mystery
to Ashbery’s death down this tunnel and how Happy Hoolgan
was behind it all along in a scene to be painted on a future
five-dollar bill in a state of anarchy around the corner.
Once the council approves our escape plan out of this tunnel
and into the promised land where the senses will run free.