Transference
How will you spin fermented want into a poem? Is a poem that is high on its own words, still a poem? Doesn’t ugliness propagate inside a clever turn of phrase? Doesn’t emptiness multiply in the space between metered lines? How do you return to the place where it all began to go wrong? Don’t understanding and awkwardness have different half-lives? Don’t love and life reside on different planes? Fill different parentheses? Don’t being and becoming manifest as antonyms? Opposite ellipses? Can you imagine holding the sea to account? As if the waves have learnt to count syllables with the daytime moon? As if the surf is witness? As if sand is euphemism. As if wind is innocent metaphor. The unanswered grumbles — one within the other, one birthing the other, touching, scratching, screaming: how will you gather their angst in a verse? Tell me, where the hem of the sky brushes the water, what is wetness? Tell me, that cloud, that cloud that masks the sun now, what was it hiding before? Does the poem know? Does the poet know? Does the cloud? When desire burns itself into longing, when waiting for nothing is still waiting, when an unnamed wanting is still wanting, when a poet is in torment when a poem is impotent how long does night walk before what walks is morning?
#Poetry
"How do you return to the place where it all began to go wrong? "
Ah "fermented wanting." Every once in a while you write a poem like this articulating the angst of trying to be genuine as a poet, and you capture it so deeply that you leave me in awe. This is one of those. But night will become morning. I think we can count on it. I count on you.
Dear Rajani,
I was gazing at a huge white cloud the other day, thinking how many people would take it for granted without a second glance.
My best,
Mahdi