On Wading An Ars Poetica
The elusive leech is here. A wired thought wraps its odd mouth around a big toe & sucks, sometimes bites, & we react in finality to the darkening page. For certain, this is all a poem could ever be: a wading verse, a toe on the surface of a deep lake painting what willing phrase comes closest. It’s the coy fish here to startle us with inspiration again. Sudden in its half built draft-ness, its humility. It hurts, maybe there’s even blood. Maybe our protagonists have spoiled into ornery, horny ruined antagonists. Hungry breathers piddling around flat waters, we. Maybe poetry is less prancing, more haunting, more hovering over a waterbank, more blurry mirrors & watery portals. Sometimes we float above it like better angels, or beady messengers. Mostly, it’s all ghosts & guttural bottom of the lake sort of junk. You don’t necessarily need it to survive. You don’t even really get it until you’ve been dead, or bloated, chewed up & desperate for a while. Any dry visitor can hold a fishing pole & sit buzzing as a tapping pen. It takes a wader to stun a fish into greedy hunger. So enraptured one forgets a life for the taste of another biting thought.
