Leaf to leaf, door to door

OATMEAL BANTER

Light eddying through layers

of overcast gray sky

whispering, simplify.

Willow’s underleaf, lyre-players?

Silver.  Copper-gray the color

of this beech’s mammoth shade,

whose granite roots cascade

light (leaf to leaf, & door 

to door).  Motionless in time-

space, emitting signs

her gray hide underlines

in graphite (stubborn Balaam’s

Hoover-prophecy).  The beech,

the book, will not be moved.

Ink trail of raven-dove...

bare gouache, still ground (beseech

thee, spare thy headstrong mule) –

O break the prison mold,

snow-blind brain-cold!

Where father & son meet (fool

with fool) beneath the malachite

green veins, gray matter

of bran (or oatmeal banter).

Strange personal jade wight –

shade-mutter, everlasting

Sheba.  Clouds gather

overhead – weather

lit thunder (shackle-blasting).

2.4.16

... thus, the poem as art-work. the art-work as entity, organism, a specific thing with its quiddity, etc.

What gives the poem as artwork its particular form? beginnings & endings... narrative a subset of dramatic form? (identification, crisis, denouement...)

underlying this focus on the poem as "sculpture" is a formal shape. perhaps it's the form of drama (unfolding plot-flower, flowerpot). or perhaps my obsession with this is just a symptom of the librarian's disease : to see everything in terms of closure between the covers of a book. summa everythingumologica.

that's what I want, though : the drama in the book. the Great American Hovel.

back to when I must have lost that book in a field somewhere.

August flowers, going dry & spindly. crickets & cicadas.

evening sneaks up, unnoticed, on the late afternoon.