THE INEVITABLE LIGHTNESS
The roads and everything on them fly up and dissolve
a net rises from the earth
the cobweb in which it was dying
and the earth breathes naked with its new scars
and sky everywhere
Jessica Greenbaum
INVENTING DIFFICULTY
"All music is what awakens jrom you
when you are reminded by the instruments."
- Walt Whitman,
(~
Song oj the Occupations"
"(Contemporary) Amen'can poetry lacks ideas."
- John Haines, "The Hole in the Bucket"
You wouldn't say genius invented this world alone,
Overthrowing difficulty to make our days waterwheels,
bucket turning bucket of light into evening,
and that underwater half rising to its tiara, Queen
Noon at the coronation. P!!rhaps a songwriter's
responsible for wind's attachment to leaves,
for the inseparable lyrics to earthly beauty we've memorized
before birth and come here with, already on our lips;
the way hearing "Prufrock" makes a
~low
groove in the brain,
then plays
you,
hearing it again. Poets
make reunions, but what do we invent? "American poetry
lacks ideas ." I turn this thought over while testing .
almond croissant around my city . . . . Usually deluxe and banal
simultaneously, (a town my contemporaries
could
write into being)
today her housecoat familiarity
