ODE: IF I WROTE LUNCH POEMS ///Saramanda Swigart
O’Hara, how brilliantly you use the run-on sentence, almost as though a Bible story met and copulated with a school circular, and what lovely music you make from the quotidian ho-hum and the quite disgusting and urban, and how I admire the stream-of-consciousness way you celebrate moments as though they are now, or now, or even now, like you’re chasing chickens, and you catch each second in your exotic fixative, I would use an amber metaphor, but given your style maybe something more contemporary, like varnish, but really what could be more meaningless! Poems caught for millennia, as if by accident, in varnish, vanish. Oh, bravo. I want to use the inside of your brain, its gravitas. Stuck with mine. A foundry, sparks flying from the arc welder, a tannery with something unseen burning behind it (that smell), a dry flowerpot with two struggling impatiens in it and no one to water, strange colors in my dawn the yellow of a partially-healed bruise, old junky-arm. Strip the sheath off those words and twist the raw sinew like a nerve. Drop your words in boiling acid and hear them sizzle, reduce to bones. Release the words, struggling, held by the tail, into an electrified maze and watch them dance, those white freeloaders, dance for their lunch, for the sinister delight of all those fonts. This is how I imagine your brain, but what nonsense, you went to Harvard and Michigan (go blue!) and were known as a warm, passionate man with many famous friends and lovers. Why see a tortured soul? Anguish oozing from the lines like Catullus, Ovid’s furious fecundity, all those words like tropical plants, or any of the countless others you admired and/or would have liked to sleep with. Your brain isn’t scary, they say, but really? Scary’s where the words are. Shall we bring it all around, summarize, keep reading and writing here? Runon, copulate, in exotic fixative: varnish. The brain is a crowded place full of doves. Wing noise. Tanneries too. And mice sizzling for lunch. Dead flowers, dead among the broken fonts. A brain that scares and spews, brain words.
LITERARY-ARTS 7
