I really need your help with this unfinished piece. Is there interest? Is there cohesion? Where is there too much confusion? Would the poem benefit from more form? Thank you in advance.I.
In myself, when Paul called, a loss for adequate reply yawned
below the flimsy words that Paul called upon to express the bad fact,
the immediate objects as Pierce would have it, the representations, the signs
of the dynamical object: a pancreas that is, now, completely a tumor.
How this reference to the guts of his father makes me know—
know in a movement like striking—how ridiculous a telephone is,
and how useless a sentence of words -(“Oh, I’m sorry”),
to be walking up the stair in socks—
who ever could have thought a second floor, a rug, a shoe,
necessities?
II.
In my own father, the hair grows wispy and parts,
with a fineness like the thinness in a cloud, reveals
a mystery is on the other side. I don’t know much at all about
these animal bodies that keep us as their pets,
these animal bodies we tend until they die.
What is it that makes the pate shine?
III.
In ourselves, the signs of our animal selves are printed, but people-fur
being unlike that of a tiger, unconfined to zoo and picture book,
seems less than beautiful. In fact I was amazed, I scrutinized
I was moved, my stomach lurched in delight when I saw my sister’s eye
brows finally unplucked. The fan of individual dark hairs
so different from what I’d seen in magazines.
It was a sheaf of wheat, it was a beauty
that only could have grown.
IV.
In the bedroom, we no longer can perceive
human bodies through the stencils of clothes,
sectioned off by color and printed matter, ruled
muscle-charts mislead us; they look nothing like meats.
And what name for the side of your neck
where I put my face and let my world go dark?
V.
In going out-of-doors, even when the sky is white with impending storm,
even when the grass is dun where it lays
in large swathes, it soothes the eye, it slows the mind,
to view for moments in a row at the speed of a person walking
these expanses of sameness.
What I see of the world is the shape of my eyeholes,
what I see of myself is the breeze, my whiskers trembling.
VI.
In my own theorizing I conclude
it is the respites from confusion,
it is these vastnesses—of color or darkness, of time
spent gazing at a face or a feeling—these true us to our bodies.
As even a small theory is needlessly wide,
I’m sure Paul will want to crumple this one
and throw it in the gutter and keep his face in city clutter.