Tuesday 128: Outside, night

Outside, night


You can go ahead
and complain to me
about the itch on your leg
that won’t go away.
I don’t mind. Eventually,
I bet it heals itself
and gets married, or scabs.
That’s usually what happens.

Who will unfasten this
boy, though, crouched
like a cat
on his phone, in a lovely cardigan,
gnashing at the edges
of life’s hallway—a hallway,
invariably, in a hotel, in Chicago?

From my room there,
from my window,
I can see a planet
swim
in the spider of darkness,
the river of stars.

I don’t know
which one it is, and
anyway, it doesn’t get much simpler
than to be of the earth
rather than on it,

to be just
a drink
in a dark and
dying city.

One of the things I admire most in a poet is their ability to surprise the reader with some form or sound or idea. Although I read a lot of formal poetry in college, and I really love Auden and Yeats and Seamus Heaney and stuff that nudges you in a way toward formal exegesis and some consideration of rhyme and meter, it was work like John Berryman, John Ashberry, Charles Simic, and Tomaz Salamun’s that made me really want to be a poet—to work to get to the point they operate from.

There’s plenty of academic discussion around this type of work too, but before (and to me superseding) all of that, there’s this daring and urgent element to it. Language remains, first and foremost, inventive.1 I remember reading Berryman’s “Dream Song 14” for the first time, getting to the bottom of the page, and chuckling, like, “Wait, what the fuck was that?”

That’s certainly not the only thing that I think good poetry does, but it’s one thing.