Anti-Anatomical Conclusion, or
Stealing the Trespass from the Thief
An ending is an alias. The poem goes on, in disguise, elsewhere.
But that change of guise or gait often seems painful and awkward.
The culprit is anything but elusive. She stumbles at the portal of the
next poem, the 'new' one. And can't get in without damaging
its architecture, anatomy.
Or
making the poem might require stealth. Coming or going.
And given the sometime circularity of the word, of the a.k.a.,
it's just as well to grant the interchangeable quality of beginning
and ending.
Say the poem is a form, albeit a moving, animate one.
A generative structure in not determinative.
No consistent fingerprint.
Or say that the poem's costuming is only suggestive of identity and
some kind of lung and gristle flail underneath with a volition all
their own.
*
The spectral ends of continuity get damaged, bruised, and this is
the poem's basis. The bruise says: I'm alive; blood has flowed
through this channel.
(At a recent appointment, my physical therapist began kneading my
thigh in an excruciatingly painful way. "This is not relaxing my muscle,"
I gasped. "Oh no," he replied, "this is called traumatic massage." The idea
is, almost, to do damage. Bruising the muscle brings in blood, which, it is
hoped, will soften, make more fluid, the rigid fibers.)
To display the bruise is not to delimit the vigor
of the poem. It only exposes a part of the limb that extends indefinitely
from the hem of the garment. Blood once flowed here. And still
does, in traceries no one deigns to specify.
*
One might pick a lock and that's a way to blur the doorway's sense of
exterior and interior. Some one is breathing, there, in unsecured space.
Pursuing the free movement of air through these passages,
while the air, without remark, generates
itself. Lung's moist repetition.
*
If a poem were to have a 'heart,' the mechanism against conclusion
would be in place: poem as circulatory system. Boundaries are vaguely
decorative in relation to a nearly endless movement.
The name of a particular word, its enunciatory title: lub-dub's ironic
and happy irrelevance.
—Elizabeth Robinson