Brevity
What I need a good poem,
a poem lifespan-short, a poem
I can shoe-horn between instants,
a poem that, in a pinch, says so much
I’ll understand the long and short of it
by the depth of calluses building on my brain.
But that’s not happening —count ’em,
I’m already up to eight lines, so it’s
too late for brevity.
What I want is a poem that says something
without rolling on forever, Amazon-like,
swaying to rhythms of topographical switchbacks
and eddies of rivers and streams, or swirls into
another cul-de-sac of human error.
Yes, I can see now that this won’t end here
in brute summation like a dead fish
wrapped in newsprint plopped on the desk
of a collaborator, warning of impending,
but once-avoidable, consequence.
No, it’ll go on until all nouns, verbs, conjugations,
and (especially) absolute clauses, have been spent.
It’ll go on till this mine of memory and metaphor,
no more complete than the store of meanings
and explications dragged inside-out by ripping flows of
pregnant clauses scribbled in blood & bone that have
led to others, and others, and others and poured from buckets
into the tides of the sea-bound flood of recollecting multitudes
of sisters and brothers, and fathers and mothers as time
tips its hat and evaporates in the heat of life.
Jim Culleny
7/1/18 & 25
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.