The Russian Formalists

mikael de lara co

The Russian Formalists

So much laceration in this world. So few leaves. A child holds his tongue and is sure to release it. If not now, then later, and almost never in song. We imagine his throat leaning towards anger and we lean back, reaching for the opposite of astonishment, hurrying to attach words to other words. Forgetting how, in the quietude of imagining, the snow, though distant, reveals a secret luminosity. Jakobson, after all, understood literature as "organized violence committed on ordinary speech." I imagine the child stripped from a breast, finding a lonely vowel meaning milk. Or the scholar, a century ago, walking the cratered streets of Moscow, thinking of flowers. Blue ones. Can anything be less violent? The minefields always find enough tenderness to welcome starlight. The heart, though dark, curls inside the hollow of a tree, looks around and sees something other than wound. Allows itself to be held.

2