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Todd Swift
One Hundred Lines
I had come to the place,
Where, hearing talk of it,
One thinks never to reach:
The shelf lemmings dare
Bypass, books in Empson’s
Earthquakes quiver from,
The past-clever home
For poets, when, inkhorn
Dry, their plain pure language
Has run out, like some
Battered car in Texas,
Miles and miles from gas,
Ironic in the midst of all
The diving pens into the soil,
Those upstart, downturning
Peckers that dive for oil,
And dot the desert like a rash;
Judging by such an arid
Moonscape as a base to write,
One leans on the hood, chews
A ‘pick and spits, to think
On all the vast wide space
Bequeathed to the mind,
To imagine as full of something
Else: the roaming creatures
That writing finds. A lodestone
Or lone star sort of state, depending –
But basically, blank as a cheque
From a friend who has up and died,
So you might scrawl in some line
Pretending to be them, to cash in,
But can’t – your style your own
Or, following on Seneca, refined,
Or rather, naturally form-fitted
To your virtue; that is, my zoo
Animals, or was it circus, have
All petrified. They’re through.
Gone daddy gone. No more
Reason for being blue or true.
Was language ever designed
Like a Hughes jet, to deliver
A verity? Seems hard to land
Such a wide-bodied claim,
Even when the land is big as sky.
What died to make words ring
With truth? To me, that idea
Pertains to the thing after words,
Or previously, a past episode.
I load my ore with outlandish
Clutter, not to bring the steer in
To brand, or land the walloping
Salmon to the shore, but to sing
A score that has no meaning other than
The sound, or even more, the fun –
That’s too plain, but anyway, this voice
Chosen here is not mine, phew, glad
That confession’s over – but then
Whose is it? Professor X’s?
Artifice and authenticity begin the same,
In someone (or automaton) pretending
To compose by laying words on end,
An endless track from sea to sea,
On which all industry and commerce
Depend. I don’t claim to be Jesse
James, or the King James version, either,
Liable to halt the engine as it sails
Across the waves of prairie, to offload
The golden insight in the big black vault.
The fault is in the chug-chug procession
Of creation, which begins to cease,
Like biological conditions of the specimen;
Organic? Didn’t mean to be, believe
In quite the reverse, creation less Darwinian,
The finger-zapped instanter blast of a God
Making all everything ever at once,
Which, when written (said) sounds false,
Perhaps the reason writing is dangerous:
By putting down the line one shows
Precisely the ignorance by which one knows
What isn’t true or cannot be said, what
Thoughts, before they happened, were
Not even oozing from the oil of the head.
So there’s the theme I haven’t had:
Two summers since I tended to my Dad,
Dying, as all do, and how mourning fed
A kind of released grandeur from my tongue;
As when I wanted poetry, when young;
Now, having stopped my sorrow
As one does, in time, I have also found
No more reason to need to rhyme;
It is the ending of the need that begins
The play – the spooling out of the spider’s
Fibre strong as caution but light as day –
Enwebbed, one writes, or then is written on,
And nothing placed into the midst belongs
To evidence or witness stand – floats free –
Or hopes to, in sticky search of locking-in
The wriggling at the pit of poetry –
A smallest beast, to suck dry of its blood,
An ending better than the start is good.
Variations On A Dull Set
Stopped being interesting
Stopped being interesting a long time ago
A long time stopped
Being interesting
Stopped a long being
Being stopped
Stopped long ago
Being interesting stopped
Stopped a long time
Time being interesting
A being time stopped
Time ago, long
Long time interesting
Interesting stopped being
A stopped being, interesting
Go, be stopped, time
A go go, agog, stopgap
Timely long johns loiter
Being becoming boring
Writing became boring long ago
Shift into a going concern
Concern beings, go interesting
Get out of here
Go into business, stop studying
Get long, snarl up
Examine interesting time, go
Get being education, exams
Get-go and snag boringness acumen
Examine interest, be earnest, get
Go into getting, go on, ongoing
Experts exemplify learning, agog
Goggles going into seawater sing
This is getting interesting, between
One thing and a going business
Get out of time, go learn interest
Payment gets going, outsmarts stoppage
It never stops, it’s being doing this
Going on for a long time now
A god is a time being interested in stop
And go, stop and go, being a long time
Green Girl in Vermont
That green girl,
Going through the green,
Leaves like seawater,
Water like a tree,
Green as gold,
Green as envy,
Not ten years ago,
Not even three,
Greenest ever seen,
Known for miles around,
That green girl,
Quick as an eye,
Faster than a nail,
Filing the wind,
Cutting windows down,
Open to the weather,
Seen from above,
And on the ground,
More like a person
Than a thing,
More like a song
Than a singing,
Hardly a word spoken
No vessels broken,
No offerings or tokens
Slipped past the toll,
Out on the road,
Green as the knoll,
Grass grown over her
Now, though still
Thinking of the green girl
That none of us
Came to know,
All wanting to say
Stop and say hello,
How her dress was yellow,
And the moon was gold,
And the snow grew
Like hill-flowers to cover
The face of her name
And the name of her lover,
Beside her as she goes
Green girl, endlessly stopping
In our town for a vanilla
Milkshake, we missed
Those days, those clover
Days of summer and sun
And swimming naked,
Going through that surface
To be naked a few feet below
And weeds tangling
At our head and our toes
Green as the girl
We all loved when young.
Green as moss that goes
Like fire over the stones.
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