A prose-poem from my Postmodernism class — I cannot recall exactly what the assignment was, but I know it involved staggered pieces, and detached paragraphs, working with one another because they are in proximity. Proximity creates the meaning, not the content on its own.
shadows can’t dance
The secret to good writing, I’ve heard it said, is never to stop. Never lift pen from page or tear paper from those metal-typing teeth you still see sometimes on PBS. Never stifle the sparks that swarm through gray matter, appearing and vanishing like fireflies. It’s in the moments between light and dusk, when ideas hover somewhere in the tangles of us, that we become aware of an uneasy emptiness. This is where a poem lies – dormant and in pieces, between spine and flesh, waiting for the pulsing glow to reveal what we know is there, but can’t see.
There’s a basement, still and windowless; a light bulb surges – the storm outside lays siege, clamoring to reclaim the dark. He holds fast to a naked wire. Carl Sandburg explained, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” I think if you strain enough, or even not at all, that light speaks loudest in the dark.
I remember the muffled warmth of daylight, drifting down on me in layers – the calm afterward in the war over sleep. Only that gentle hand could pass through my mother’s makeshift shield of cloth upon the window. I became iron, invincible to the sort of sinister things that live in darkness and, as children, we are certain mean us harm. But even though we perpetually dreamed, we couldn’t be sure what was out there. Fear sprung from the possibility of catching a glimpse and losing the reliable protection that closing our eyes gave to us. But it seemed quite silly for me to deny monsters their lives.
“Realize that oblique is a kind of dissent from a straight line, from the party line, from a line you’re supposed to toe,” G.S. Giscombe says. That means checking your peripherals, like that taxi he drove in Albany. Objects may appear closer when looking.
Most dictionaries, when confronted with absence, smother it into a physical context. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it, “The state of being away from a place or person.” But the word, for a breathing poem, is a much less constricting thing. Poetry is the art of pointing out absence. It is sifting through infinite layers of ways to describe the world, lifting our sieve from the depths with just a handful of fragmented ideas, like word magnets on a fridge. Language and perspective are forever obligated to crack, shatter, and search. It is the potentiality of words, and their affair with context and lyricism that leaves a poem forever unfinished.
“A poem is never finished,” Paul Valéry said, “only abandoned.”
The emptiness between lines and words and syllables shouts loudly. That’s when we consider what has not been said, and what cannot be said. That’s when we notice Sandburg’s shadows, and they become all the more meaningful for it. Those shadows may be dancing, but as long as we are in the dark…