The absence of the imagination had
itself to be imagined.
—Wallace Stevens, "The Plain
Sense of Things"
Make it new,
make it plain,
make it sing, no ideas
but in things—now
who am I?
And how is it right to talk
in a future
where I'm
seeing digital pictures
of those things
instead of originals?
Like, just this morning—
the towering
figure of a guy
so prim in his black
and white suit and tie,
so shy—so 1945 New-
England-buttoned-down, he'd likely
never have said fuck at all
the way I do so
casually today,
whether out in public
or mired like this,
in a much plainer poem
(sketched, by the way,
in pajamas on a smartphone)
about far less plain things—
such as my own disillusionment
with images. Or else, the way
I've taken all these
pictures for granted.
I've never really known
the full weight
of physical media,
felt the fineness of excess
or correctness of old
catastrophes—
let alone
straightened my dour tie and
proceeded to imagine, somehow
much more wildly
impossible things:
the bronzed edges of space
where golden birds sing
their wordless songs
of thought, perched firmly
on a palm
of a hand
which might be mine,
or might be
the frond of a tree
still growing, even now—
still blowing
in the same slow wind
at the end of the mind.
