Words

If I could remember the order in which I learned the words I know,
what sort of poem or prayer would it be? The verbs might not
fit where grammar says they should, the nouns might not furnish
a house or town or playground very sensibly. Maybe the narrative,
the dark side of the moon of my life story, would reveal itself
in the organic list of words. Maybe the world’s truth, like a vein
of some as-yet-unnamed precious ore, would be exposed
for plunder. Did I learn lightning before thunder? Did father
come so long after mother that I had to do kiddy detective work
to fit one to the other? What sort of madness was the alphabet
when I was four? How did the letters find one another?
Still, sometimes, driving through deserts or great plains,
I search for the elusive creature, Ellemenopee, whom I now
believe to be a microscopic being with many eyes, all blind.


*


I was reading Robert Pinsky's Gulf Music, a nicely conceptual series of poems that doesn't force its motifs upon you. As you read, you discover the formal and thematic counterpoints without much difficulty, but still, they (generally) show how repetition can be such an inventive, compelling device in poetry. Also, it has the right degree of disjunction: enough to tilt you into confusion, but not so much that it leaves you there. You come back with a fresh eye for the field of view each poem offers.


Anyway, I was reading a poem in the collection called "Rhyme" that starts of simply enough --  series of declensions, but subtly abandoning that for something referential -- the art of Joseph Cornell -- becoming, I suppose, a slightly effaced ekphrasis, or at least an inspiration from Cornell: a word-box to match Cornell's thing-boxes.


It starts:


Air an instrument of the tongue,
The tongue an instrument
Of the body, the body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.


Then, as the poem continued (as I continued reading it, I mean -- looking, cannibalistically, for my own poem of the morning), I entered the Cornell box of the poem: objects in my mind displaced the objects in the poem, and another sort of declension or pattern of growth took over. The "theme" somehow was origins, and -- as so often in poems -- the poem itself, or, more broadly, language. One good game to play in poetry, in art generally, is to flirt with navel-gazing, but not fall into the navel. Or: the ostensible theme, "words," is itself metonymic of other things that are found in the origin story. Fear, love, disappointment, wonder, quest -- I've tried to enlist them, above.


There is a modality -- question series, suppositions; and a faint sense of time: the lost past, the unlikely future, and the recurring effort in the present to move, and avoid ruts.


Poems always have so much more  in them than the lines can show. That's what a poem is. A good poem finds a balance between visible and invisible.