On the tendency toward solipsism in literature
l.
Where am I in your poems?
How can you be there without
the boundary defining you—the place
we are accomplishing? Are you
a blob, unmanageable endless omnivore,
a science fiction fact, the total topographical
of earth, a mobile constellation, quirky quasar,
voluminous vegetal omniscient—
how about that?
Where are you leading—except
to Parmenides, his circle
spherically flat?
2.
The unimpassioned poem is retrospective of a flight
responsible only to
its own hovering images that link
Ming vases with the tense
of made things, of mental surfaces, and with feelings
shaped to the fixed glaze of a tight, washable glisten.
Feathers can dust the unimpassioned poem
where nothing
importunately clings
but the poem whose rude textures
grapple with the live space
around the self
can grip the air
and hold light, and fly
as the earth flies
—D. H. Melhem
____
from “Children of the House Afire”, in New York Poems (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2005)