A MARK
Pool bottom scorch-mark of
An angel. Post-precipice angelic
Mark. Memory cut of sweet
Fleet angel gone. There against
Pool-shimmer where I dove
Like a seizure, tongue-clamp’d
Against a fit. To name
A thing burns nobody clean.
~
Emerson to Fuller: “Whoever lives must rise & grow. Life like the nimble Tartar still overleaps the Chinese wall of distinction that had made an eternal boundary in our geography.”
A CLARIFICATION
A confederate demands more about how “reading without regard for clique- and claque-lines” gets label’d dilettantism. See my scruffy one-liner about “hypervigilance.” Fair enough.
Reading against one’s clique—that is, omnivorously, unhesitantly, exceedingly—is the sine qua non of any robust criticism (or its recent simulacrum of “author-divvying”) or poetry writing. Part of the job description. To constitute it as a particular “project” (donc, “admirable,” donc, “worthy of our attention”) smacks, yes, of dilettantism, attending schematically to a superficies. Gourmandizing.
~
Noted: a moth gone mad, a little two
Millimeter ash-color’d smutch of a thing,
Launching and re-launching itself and expertly
Landing. Flying loops the size of a hole.
~
To work.
