Staring At the Sea

A Poem (For Edward Hirsch) “To understand poetry, we need four white walls and a silence where the poet’s voice can weep and sing.” – Federico Garcia Lorca A poem is a dream that refigures reality. A poem is a lullaby that wounds. A poem is an intense and benevolent transformation of sexual energy, a transubstantiation of feeling into words (or vice versa). A poem is a heated discussion about cold reality. A poem is a requiem for delight. A poem is a devouring Passion (Rapture testifies). A poem can make even emptiness seem full. A poem is a recordation of a moment where the heart enlarges. A poem is a dramatization of intense states of feeling (feelings of oceanic depth). A poem is a locked room (stanza) we inhabit and then open up for someone else to experience. A poem is a ‘little song’ moving ‘a little beyond’ (a transcendental sonnet). A poem is a rhythmic restructuring of time (versified, rimeful, rhythmic, and alliterative). A poem is a craftwork learned from excessive thinking/feeling. A poem is the mind freeing itself from the blood-drowned interior where it has been hidden all along. A poem is the oyster revealing its pearl. A poem is a manifestation of a desire, a need, to catalog and classify. A poem is the dawn light, reeling from the mental/physical/spiritual accretion of dreams. A poem is openhearted didacticism. A poem is strophe, antistrophe and epode; thesis, antithesis and synthesis. A poem is not mentation, emotion, or invocation alone, but all three, all in one. A poem is the three candles of the one scholar (to rearrange Wallace Stevens). A poem is a polemic, but also a panegyric. A poem is a full conversion into the mysticism and mysteriousness of reality. A poem is both losing and reconstituting one’s self, (either the writer’s own or the reader’s). A poem is discovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives. A poem renews us by making the ordinary world fresh and strange. A poem is an estrangement of the familiar. A poem is the result of staying constantly attuned to the CDs and MP3s and radios and talk shows and static and protracted silences of daily experience. A poem is not a fountainhead, but a Brita filter (inclusive, but also ex-). A poem is pure, healing water. A poem is a risible, unleavened. A poem is condensation and distillation. A poem is nothing more than a conversational exchange with the wind, (taking for (and from) the wind what you will). A poem is a light drawn to the lure of the darkness. A poem is a movement inside the stillness. A poem seeks to alleviate human suffering and to preserve the human image, the humane mind. A poem is the obscure sense of possible sublimity. A poem wants justice through language. A poem is freedom conceiving from its cell, (or spell). A poem is/ a hole/ in a wall./A wall against which the imagination and joy of writing are leveled. A poem removes your eyelids (or at least pries them open for a sustained moment, like that creepy scene in “A Clockwork Orange”). A poem is “like an eyelid atrociously and forcibly uplifted” (Neruda). A poem is not a gratuitous, nonsensical proliferation of metaphors, (Pablo walked a thin, but beatific, line). A poem is a creation that makes a face out of ineffaceability. A poem is a grasping at both the knowable and ineffable. A poem is a chronicle of individual daily life and universal eternity. A poem is a moment of tomeful understanding (Eureka!). A poem stands somewhere in between complete isolation and mystic communion (vacillating often). A poem is a name that engenders the reality. A poem is a quest for the immortal and irretrievable beloved. A poem is a love letter to an imaginary beloved far away, (or a love letter to a real beloved who now seems imaginary, though still quite near). A poem is a dialogue between inner and outer worlds. A poem is speaking back to the inner-voices, (not to get all schizo about it). A poem is the social act of a solitary maker. A poem enacts the self’s solitary struggle with the soul. A poem is “a soul in action through words” (Hirsch). A poem is, unlike so many of our societal activities these days, not something that requires multi-tasking. A poem is both an embracement and a negation of time. A poem is a temporary departure from the occasional world into a world where nothing but yourself happens, (not to be egotistical). A poem is written with plenipotentiary authority, while remaining humble as His servant. A poem is a celebration of internal power. A poem is a knowing, naïve innocence and unsophisticated wonderment. A poem is the sound of air coming through your bedroom’s heat duct on a cold winter’s night, (inspiring docile, ductile emotion). A poem is a darkness that settles in quietly outside. A poem is a turning away from human commerce. A poem is silence.