Tuesday, February 7
NOCTURNE WITH AESTHETIC CRISIS Middle of the night I wake and realize I've been assembling an acknowledgments page, not a book. Middle of the night I wake to rain, quiet, time passing in the dark. You know, they do pay for poems. $50 or so, direct deposit sometimes, ten burritos or an oil change, and all I have to do is slant wreath and grief, shudder and brother, break the line where stress sponsors feeling, say please, my pleasure, go for a walk. It's like I've said— everything is permitted these days or, what amounts to the same thing, forbidden. Pretending rain in August on the border. Knowing every raindrop by its name. Weather—time passing—brother—love in the dark. Translation is something I don't practice, practice all the time, like dreaming or shaving—lone pearl of blood—then waking with a beard, renewed faith in composition. The greatest translator, of course, is death, but why say anything about death when I'm dying, have been dying for years? Tiresome. Please wire some money—the discipline is in crisis. The book is in crisis, poems slipping into prose, bad prose, thoughts rushing toward a cliff. Just don't say cliff. Or lemming. If you say lemming just make sure they drown plausibly. Audibly, the stresses falling about us, beyond material constraint. I love watching the shadows on water, tiny at first, like raindrops, I love how quickly they swell, take shape—swell, I said— falling, the darkness on water, quiet, before impact. (D. S. Waldman)