Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2006 by Young, Dean

Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels.

You want happy endings, read cookbooks. Not closure, word filtched

from self-help fuzzing the argument. Endsville. Kaput. Form is the shape

of the selecting intelligence because time is running out. Form enacts

fatality. To pretend otherwise is obfuscation, philosophical hub-bub of

the worst sort. A lie. We die. We go to art to learn the unlearnable,

experience the unexperiencable. Art reports back. Form is the connect,

primal haunt, carbon chain end-stopped. You can tell it's late because

we prefer the songs of Orpheus after he's torn apart. Pattern as much a

deficiency as a realization. No one gets to count forever. Irreverence is

irrelevant's revenge. When you slice yourself open, you don't find a

construct. Bloom rhyming with doom pretty much took care of Keats.

Wire in the monkey's diencephalon prints out a wave most beautiful.

Open form prone to mouse-droppings just as closed to suffocation. The

river swims in the fish. The giraffe goes knock-kneed to drink. The girl

ties back her hair in a universal gesture. Theories about art aren't art

any more than a description of an aphid is an aphid. A menu isn't a

meal. We're trying to build birds, not birdhouses. Put your trust in the

inexhaustible nature of the murmur, Breton said that and know when to

shut up, I'm saying that. We're not equations with hats. Nothing appears

without an edge. There's nothing worse than a poem that doesn't stop.

No one lives in a box. The heart isn't grown on a grid. The ship has sailed

and the trail is shiny in the dew. Door slam, howling in the wood, rumble

strips before the toll booth. Enter: Fortinbras. Ovipositor. Snow. Bam

bam bam, let's get out of here. What I know about form couldn't fill a

thimble. What form knows about me will be my end.