Friday, June 17, 2011

untitled (about what)

I’d like to welcome all things without names.
Not almond slivers, spring fever or motherboards.
Not baby’s breath, embouchure, heliofranticulating or stein lids.

But this poem isn’t a muster roll call, award pageant or paean.
It’s an open field of summer that barely contains its own accord.
It’s something like the unnamed soul of a fictive goat kid.

I want to invite not those things either but my own mind to the game
of conceiving what things might fall through a sky-lintelled undoor.
Try to describe in a teenager’s vocabulary the face of God.

Does everything called a dandelion look the same?
Please don’t label the line between the winter tree and the apple core.
The phenomena of names is only a grown-up cloud

that has insertions where some other welcome waterflame
verbing unaboutly holidays its last shardcords
(of deselected ancientless pluribus-tethered kiteydids).

2 comments:

  1. Woah, Daniel, what a gorgeous trove! I'm savoring "It’s an open field of summer that barely contains its own accord"...Feeling a thealogical star trek after "conceiving what things might fall through a sky-lintelled undoor"....Remembering Harold and Maude with "Does everything called a dandelion look the same?".... Persuaded by "Please don’t label the line between the winter tree and the apple core"....Haunted by "The phenomena of names is only a grown-up cloud".... Would love to hear your creation process and sparks! This has a quality of ancient truthness throughout, how even each line's thinking itself is catawamp brain-changer. Thanks for this!

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  2. :) TY, Scooter
    I really do want to welcome unnamed things and got fascinated in trying to write a poem about that category of pieces of existence. Catawamp proved a good form since its stringency and interwoven complexity of rhyme and meaning help guide the poet to the words that eventually get chosen--otherwise there might be no way to end the poem. My rhymes are pretty clear here. My meanings had something to do with A: welcoming words (welcome, invite, call) B: seasons and C: ages (baby, kid, teenager...) SO with a nebulous subject and a rigid form, these strange combinations and phrasings formed.

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