How Move the Boulder
       

Yes! may be the best way to start
over and may even for a moment
create the sense of new slack
in the chains and may even
when those moments add up
make the chains suffer and relent.
Look! is a form of yes and Fine
is yes paused because every sentience
requires a rest and even No
even as a final answer
may most be an affirmation
of something else
and also when it follows a question
Frenchishly or is inflected by awe.
It is not I who speak, but the jackal
of history set upon by beautiful mouths
that storms through me.
There is no telling what can save us
in such a game of time and urge
in a whirlwind of sharp-edged objects
but the imperatives collate brief sparks
compelling us to crash through
the sullen walls of the terrarium
which lead to the moments
of catching our breath. One mississippi.
A window is a yes. The window
is the part of the wall you go through
not in the physical sense
until it is time to leap, leap
being a yes. Sometimes you
are outside and must leap into
a window, this is undefenestrating
which is a yes in certain extremes
and this is negative capability,
this is the warped arterial machinery
when you are walking down
an avenue or touching someone's face
as if the immensity of everything
pressing against everything else
is located pointedly inside you.
Yes! as the ring goes on the finger,
No! as the smoke billows
from where you used to live
or the boat flies into the beach party.
The crippling cinema of millenia
has not come to nothing, it has come
to this: everything begins here.
This will also be true tomorrow.
There is a figure behind the angular
ribbons of smoke, hold out your hand.
Even newest great books of 1383 pages
don't begin to cover it, not the tonnage
of the mountain's scarf, not the nonchalant
finesse with which it's thrown off, not
the stranger you must sing to sleep
before you climb the stairs,
the glass rocking-horse of your own heart
which you must stroke into calm
before it can once more contend with
that sea like a scrum of angry buildings,
the cliff face asking to be scaled.
See the runner leap and clear the gap
from one tall tenement house to the next
as each last one begins to implode.
See the runner, someone you know,
whose pulse you can feel like your own.
It is a winter night, and below
there is a body curled on a grate
through which warm steam rises.
See this. The rodeo rests and goes berserk
inside you. You go to work.
All else is talk.

Tweet
Copyright © 2014 Marc McKee All rights reserved
from Crazyhorse
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission