AFTER-WORDS

Please note--this has now become part of a collective blog site called ReWords, and so do go and check out this project en cours: http://rewords.blogspot.com !

I have always been a fan of the response poem, the putting of voices into dialogue. So, as I sit in my little cell-like room in Paris pounding away at the PhD which feels like my personal Sisyphisian boulder, I have this week taken up the habit of riffing off of the poems and prose paragraphs that fellow writers have shared with me such as Cole Swensen and, today, Sandy Florian. And so, in the spirit of the web being a web, intricate invisible lines spidering between our solitudes, here is my response to Sandy Florian's text which she wrote and put up today on her blog: http://thetreeofno.blogspot.com/2006/06/tree-of-no-other-to-speak.html. My response is here, a poem ping pong, as it were! from Oct 5, 2007:

Like a Wakening Form of Being

so that the flame preserved might still be kept
.....................so that I may be so unduly, so undulatingly
wired in the incandescence of this
…………………….whirling after the six-shooter in the near day
asking for intervention, waves
…………………….askance in the alcove of all this
so that I may be sleeping may be preserving
…………………….so that the horn-hymn-whipporwhorl birdcall
in the ignition of the bic of the zippo
…………………….interminable stance sentence of the sun’s scope
or captain’s wake devoid king
…………………….or son’s of kings on the angled threshold
thrush of neck exposed to the dark of this
…………………….threat of a legend of a whispering wind
under marked doors dimples dire demands
…………………….ululating dime stores and piled pick-ups dusted
perchance pleased or pleading
…………………….prayer-bound-up in mesh, rugged roped, cuffed
or simmering in the knelt-by furnace
…………………….or encroaching desert, mounds, and burials
should impel, me to compel, me to
…………………….sons and then the staunch vermillion, the burgundian
sky of this or broached topical units labelled lineage
…………………….scraped shoulder putting the back up to beam to
veer past the mythology and behold
…………………….eye in the, still central nervous brachial retchings
flame fortuitous as language, Babel or Babylon,
………………flagging in the lugged-along limping of what could only be
tide-netted
…………………….a state