CANTO 22 Who sings

 

Who sings among all these pensées

scrambling praying whining

in bits of emanations?

Is it you the new being

come to teach

the clown of one sand hopping?

I find no haven across the Alps

and alpha peaks of these cantos without order

or purpose: what is exactly our goal and our method,

how to appease the systems-management cost-accountability

franchise mentality of goal oriented rationality

inherent in the syntactic processes of discursive discourse?

I must express the inexpressible, break through

the catalectic stupor of incandescent clumsiness,

play around in all seriousness with the limits of language,

engage in a dialogue

between the mystical state not yet achieved

and the poetic sensibility not yet refined or even defined,

to use the faulty instruments of a suspect art to re-create

a doubtful reality that lies beyond the reach

of an exhausted empiricism for the benefit of an indifferent audience!

Are you the she or he who set me in the tent

here in the patch of woods where out of a flap

I can see a late strand of a worm’s silk

hang diagonally iridescing violet

up and down its length in the last day of September’s sun?

Was it your doing that got me sitting with the purple light

condensing and spinning out of my brain?

let your voice ring clear though confused

Behold then my Canto Manifesto:

appease none, account to none, follow none,

have no esthetic

but to sit and sing.

In sitting embody in situ

bodies of doctrines all effaced in the sitting.

And in singing sum up as well as side-step

the cataloguing and carping

of countless caterwauling critics.

Launch from a lather of longing

and let the song unencumber itself

of alliterative lurch. Light-footed, then,

and with acrostic wayward impetuous foresight

Negotiate trampoline curves of the in-between!

No rhythm or melody comes

but what I acknowledge

Jack and Bird and Trane and Miles to go,

and creep heavy-footed where computers

print out my catachretical collocations of brain-waves!

Light-hearted I lift my mineral spirits

into a geologic time-frame not even my reptile brain

remembers but which I know at rock-bottom

is the bone-hard calcification

of all our ivory tusks and tasks!

Sing I outward to magnetospheres, mischievous photons

that cluster in the iris of the chipmunk

that scolds and clucks with the

confidence of its atomic clock!

Sing I forward, too,

letting each leaping canto

foretell star-hinged leaves

dropping relaxed around the glowing tent

that hangs like the full moon—

sunstruck!