Ars Poetica

cribbing Bidart, Roethke, and Yoda) deeps of shining-turning, happening (

I must have had a fever, to talk too hot
and only watched and watched the going
stilly wheel. Heard the child’s music strange
the air. My mother set it up.
My mother, oh, was all around
the air, unseen, or at least, that is, I just
can’t remember her face. She was kind of at my back
and all around the room, that time. No One on the
periphery, No Body-Some Body safeguarding
or plaguing
the edges,
around and around with the moving tune,
she fully in it or with it and of it, or gone
altogether and wholly apart, although still, I know, somehow I know:
she lay me down, she set the music going.

              I pray the lord my soul
              to keep
                             —because sleep

can be dangerous? one needs a
guide? but what if the lord the Father the Muse
one has been given,
and taught by good teachers to summon,

is sort of a, well,
an asshole?

Later my musical older brother
taught me how to handle
a record album right: with absolute
respect, even terror (his records)
by the edges.

To set the all important needle
upon the spinning line, the small, inaccurate stab
not often rightly finding
the moving groove, it’s all a way of
talking, really. Though there’s nothing there to say, exactly,

nothing there to pin-
point, after all. No true, no right

there

to put the needle to.

You just sink into the turning.
You go into the going.

Damage, of course, sets in. (If you don’t want to die, somebody said,
don’t live.)
I.e., it all gets staticy and scratched
pop pop zillions of speckles and spots spackles and snaps and saying
all kinds of crackling somethings. Inevitably, that is, the silence

gets LOUD.
As though the record’s music	AMPLIFIES
	the ABSENCE
	of music

As though sound, as sound, could infuriate
the silence, the handsome young father who,
on commanding the family to quiet,
catches the uncontrolled peep
and twists around from the steering
wheel to lash her leg with a stick. Yes, it bleeds. The mother
leans down from the passenger side
to pat the gash and give him
a look.

The poor young father who’s trying to be
someone he thinks he’s required
to be: King Necktie-Early Sixties-
Kong of all
suburban feudal wickiups
or something

but the thinky teenage daughter’s
very presence, later on, her very voice

negates him
He is the Big
Someone that he is
only by virtue of her
silence

Though she must exist, somehow, to be his absence

INTOLERABLE, IT IS!

It’s all no-win, it’s all a

little war: over and over and over and over
the turntable goes
to make a thing no different from before. Thing
from a thing but we’re finally only left with
the thing…

Cynthia Nichols