Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TIE-DOWN OF A BONSAI, by MARVIN BELL Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: A ladder propped against a rainbow Subject(s): Bonsai; Language; Music & Musicians; Rainbows; Words; Vocabulary | ||||||||
A ladder propped against a rainbow: We were told that life waited to exist; death waited to be that which was and isn't. Language, of and by the living, cannot express our absence, but readies itself in stitches, erasures, the dead skin adhering to a bandage, untellings, retellings, revisions, reversions, the resonant vacancy of interlude, the qua of music, the held air in the audience just prior to coughing, the lost vacuum of a black hole, the nuclei of tears -- it is all a performance, from the tie-down of a bonsai to the reddening of apples, from the talk of Absurd Phenomenology to the passionate kiss, from angels on the head of a pin to quantum physics, from the conceptual to the pre-conceptual, from the environmentalist to the survivalist, from the garden to the slaughterhouse. Listen for an introduction to Creation: a horn sounds in the background, increases, at first each frequency of the whole seems like the plucking of a single hair, but the fog, which does not lift, filters alarm from the tighter strings, so that we hear a fatherly, throaty, fibrous drone. And in the harbors of dust, this trembling of sound waves begins our story. From the lightest touch, imprinted in the slightest disturbance, a history commences that will lead to thunder and roses, to the beginning of each kiss and to the end of each kiss, to each particular in a long line of particulars, every one with its special claim except when one may stand, as now, for innumerable others, stranded perhaps past anything we can imagine unless it be a stone thrown into the dark, the inside of a sound, tomorrow a ladder propped against a rainbow. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HOWYOUBEENS' by TERRANCE HAYES MY LIFE: REASON LOOKS FOR TWO, THEN ARRANGES IT FROM THERE by LYN HEJINIAN THE FATALIST: THE BEST WORDS by LYN HEJINIAN WRITING IS AN AID TO MEMORY: 17 by LYN HEJINIAN CANADA IN ENGLISH by JUAN FELIPE HERRERA THERE IS NO WORD by TONY HOAGLAND CONSIDERED SPEECH by JOHN HOLLANDER AND MOST OF ALL, I WANNA THANK ?Ǫ by JOHN HOLLANDER AFTER TU FU (THEY SAY YOU'RE STAYING IN A MOUNTAIN TEMPLE) by MARVIN BELL |
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