This reading aloud, I think, I hear it,
reading the poems over is certainly writing,
a kind of writing.
Even not looking, not listening to them
feels like a kind of writing.
There in its pile left with the others and its potential.
It is easy to imagine putting poems away
as a kind of dead stop.
But what about letting them settle, settle into themselves
so they can be returned to clearly
with just a bit of dusting off?
Or maybe as likely their mess takes over.
They start to grow together or mold a kind of compost
that leaving alone making becomes,
and us out in the world changing,
so different upon return as well.
And all this living happened.
And as it did, the poems started to acquire new formal ways
about them.
I would see it sometimes and sometimes I wouldn't.
Sometimes they would feel like the slight peculiarities of one
poem repeated in another.
Sometimes more clearly they'd appear.
And maybe the most obvious and peculiar
was having the titles in the interior of the poems.
Most of my poems are untitled.
And it made sense that this would happen,
the poems not really wanting to start or finish the way titles
seem to cause them to.
I found I would just underline when met with the impulse
to title.
And so there where it happened it
would stay, sometimes in the middle
anywhere, sometimes in the end.
Caution still on cold flat boards,
adulated and filling a brown pouch
with food, Melville's companionship, and more apples
I'm going to bring to the revolution.
That one's called "Melville's Companionship."
The title is underlined, and those two words are set off
like something's been done.
This one's called "The Big North Pacific Ocean."
Calm lattice sole of a thought rolled over with a finger,
I came down to see myself for a sort of conversation and then
the big North Pacific Ocean.
And other things appeared in the middle of the poems
as part of the poems, as much part of the poems as anything
else, dates and places parenthetically, interior
or dedications so that the person was right there where
they were where they are.
Sick her breaths for tea, gasping and breathing
and falling of fear.
And this one was for Cindy.
Spectral and dashing as leaves in sunlight
are there turning for Cindy in front of things quietly,
quiet and in time.
It sounds as I say it now so purposeful and willed,
but really it was just about letting it all
happen in the time it was happening,
a kind of thing done aloud and listening.
I like taking in little bits of cloud
from paintings and from towns, feet cold on ground still
standing around.
This wise and wilting thought have
turned a sweet, wet cast of the day
did come in my red bruise which was a burn pulsed like a lip
or like a tongue.