I grieve that grief can teach me nothing

**a**

At the time poetry came to be about poetry, a self-consuming artifact, a battle was waged. Major figures looked left and right, and reached back blindly, trying to determine if some other’s mind had planted its flag in his or her ass, the better to be co-opted by.  

A school of thought circled around the idea that the luster of words codified in a given poem could be calculated.  This luster would not be relative, as is the case with stars whose prominence grows or dims with distance, but set out in indelible absolutes.  Luminosity and apparent magnitude.  Units of energy per unit time per unit area =– flux.  Measure the lamentation and perceived world-amplitude of a given poem, and then maybe its worth will be self-declaring.  This is empiricism, wounded. 

Another school - the garde that strove to be most avant - gave up on poetry and the finding of tomorrow’s past. They insisted on calling movies “film,” and smoked filterless cigarettes backwards before field stripping them. Because one never knew who might be watching or listening, now did one . . .This innovation eventually Ouroboros-ed itself with its own cleverness. For $50,000 you can have an Upstream Color.  And instead the founders worshipped old Saint Stan and the day-glo canon.  As though myopia was only for optimistic ophthalmologists among us, as though parasites don’t sometimes stop floundering and start taking over. 

Another school converted poetics into pragmatics.  The job of this poem is to be an anesthetizing light into the dark corners of brooding antipathy.  The job of this poem is to make you buy a yoga mat and an elective surgery or three.   The job of this poem is to inspire you to paint the light of your suburban woods with the tight sentimental platitudes of a septuagenarian Sappho from Maine.  The job of this poem is to give voice to the quiet desperation that stretches from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side.  The job of this poem is to make the possible permissible. Let us fat all creatures else, and fat ourselves for maggots. 

**1**

In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more.  I cannot get it nearer to me.  If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave as it found me, -- neither better nor worse.  So it is with this calamity:  it does not touch me:  some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.  It was caducuous.

[ . . . ]

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.

**2**

It’s no good trying to fool yourself about love.  You can’t fall into it like a soft job without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts.  If you can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice clean soul you better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint.  Because you’ll never make it as a human being.   

**b**

                To watch a toddler toddle up to, and almost crash over, the cliff of a sidewalk’s curb, below which sits the hard dirty common street, gashed knees, and salty tears – (but no!) then veer off into the grass, at what passes for gallop and issue a squeal at the delight of being an embodied being that is becoming all the more itself with each passing day.

                To watch a hyena complain that the lion who got there first left slim pickings be watched by a vulture who will take as much as it can steal.

                Both/and, always, seemingly.

**3**

I was reading Kierkegaard and came across the phrase “To be purified is to will one thing.”  It made me sick.

**c**

                Sometimes life unfurls as though scripted by an evil French florist, as though your I being an other is not able to be encapsulated as a simile or a metaphor.  Don’t despair, but don’t be bashful in your sins or circumspect in your piety either.  The denouement may end up being governed by the ragged cirrhotic utterances of an old Southern playwright, a damsel dealing out distress.  Set the table for an opulent dinner and expect that the white linen table cloth will be crusty with wine and grease before the second cheese course is served and after the patrimony of the favored child is called into question.  Confiscate the aporia before the nuns in the wimples have their say.  Let the third act begin with a soliloquy from some place high and lonely and dark.  Remember that Rites of Spring caused a riot in its time, even if in ours it is but a segue to a public radio fund-a-thon.  Let Big Daddy be Big Daddy, and the gun-running rumhead a jamais jeune.