So I'm going to read a poem that, in some ways,
is very much still in progress, which is unwise.
But it's fitting, I think, for the day.
In the odd way in which the poem seemed to adhesively attach
to one odd thing to a next, it begins with Thoreau's journals,
where in the early 1840s, he twice mentions the fact
that the corn grows at night--
a thing which, for reasons I can't explain to myself,
concerns me.
He also, at the same time, thinks
about the flower of the pansy, and equates its name, "pansy,"
with "pense" or thinking, and has these two or three
little passages-- sentences really-- in the journals,
where he talks about the pansy as a thinking thing.
Because I'm teaching Keats, and pansies are a flower,
Keats' notion of the imagination as being that which
is not the bee collecting honey, but the flower being collected,
struck my mind.
Which then, in its absurd way, went
to the Homeric hymn to Hermes, in which Apollo gives Hermes,
at the end of this insane ordeal,
on the very first day of Hermes birth, in which he stands up,
sneaks out the door, and steals Apollo's sacred cattle--
which makes my own parenting experience seem calm.
He gives him, not a real gift of prophecy,
but allows him to talk to the bee maidens, who,
when they have eaten their fill of honey, prophecy the truth.
But when they're hungry, they tell lies.
And this poem is titled "Overtakelessness."
The corn grows at night.
The pansy thinks.
A first fact satisfies until it sings.
Pansy, as pense, revises its petal.
Pollen's adhesive edits the mile the bee dance's amendment,
the pedagogy simple--
betray the text's ample fact by dulling the sickle.
Gentlessness is a word to describe that which
must deny itself to exist.
It is a word I made up to describe to myself, myself
and other fields.
Nobody taught me this dance I dance.
I gather the air as weight around me.
Murmured rumors the pansies speak.
I learned to shake my head from side to side,
to pack my ears in pollen.
Where did I bury it, the sea--
I mean the seed?
Pansies grow pensive.
They point at the sun by opening their faces.
They open their faces to point at the sun.
Where did I bury it, the seed--
I mean the sea?
The sun rises twice, less gentle in the other field,
overtakeless in mine.
The pansies sing their nursery rhyme.
A fact is a fact.
Roots dig.
Tendrils twine.
The sun is the sun.
We call ours, I call mine.
The corn grows at night, but where is the night?
A song the sun sings to dull itself down, gentle other.
Right here is where the day begins to lull.
The bee maidens speak a minor prophecy true
when gorged on honey.
But went hungry, the bee maidens lie.
In words, there is no difference.
The poem is a hermetic delight.