UNUSUAL ALIGNMENT
The starry heavens are not my kin - the archer's
bow and the Ursa Major, none. I watch from even
a more distant place. The sleek deportment of my
distant eyes. Part of nothing but in it all. As it was
put a long time back : 'silence, exile, and cunning.'
-
Joyce took that from Balzac, who took it from -
ironically enough for Joyce - the Carthusians, an
order of monks way on the other side of his own
renunciation of Catholicism. Poor James, yes.
-
It's very apt for a poet; for not for poetry the head-on
meeting - rather the inquiry and the examination from
a bit afar, off some distance, apart. Exile, perhaps?
The poem circles its content, calls to it from a place,
looks for the hidden things, the barely connected, the
new image. Cunning, perhaps? Poems make no
appointments with their subjects; they instead
just come to be. Silence, then?
-
When the poem's address to its subject comes, it is
most often from the side, the rear, an overhead perch,
a somewhere else - the reverie determined from
destination, a detached place of being other first.
Asideness and exile. Nothing gets stared straight
in the face - like an animal or a native, nothing
really likes having its picture taken. Silence
and stillness instead can make it oblique.
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