And this is a--
there's a long sequence called "Paragraphs from a Daybook"
in Squares and Courtyards.
The paragraph is a form invented by one of my favorite poets
Hayden Carruth, whom, although I know him
only through correspondence, really consider him,
like Marie Ponsot, a mentor.
And-- nothing much to say about it--
it's a 15 line form with regularly irregular lines
and bent rhyme scheme, and that doesn't really matter much.
What really, I think, matters was my desire to make the form,
that one poet had invented, into a form that
exists in the language, because once two people have done then
it exists in a different way.
And this one is, in fact, a direct response
to a sequence of Hayden Carruth's and he's
appeasing it.
"Death is the scandal we wake up to,
Hayden, that flash in childhood, then every blue day.
Once conscious of desire, we are laden with its accountability.
Death and the singer, death and the maiden,
duets you've taken both voices and played into measured words,
their numbers cast out lines which lured a shape out,
past the lovely bodies, which it mimed and praised.
Now, the dazzling shape's your own daughter's
in the dance, appalled, amazed, as sound waves track
disaster and bone.
Futile and gorgeous gestures, words employed,
tracking the inconscient revolution
of the wheel, whose spokes revolve around a void."