Wednesday, March 10, 2021

1060. This Is Not A Poem - Joyce Carol Oates

in which the poet discovers
delicate white-parched bones
of a small creature
on a Great Lake shore
or the desiccated remains
of cruder roadkill
beside the rushing highway.

Nor is it a poem in which
a cracked mirror yields
a startled face,
or sere grasses hissing
like consonants
in a foreign language.
Family photo album
filled with yearning
strangers long deceased,
closet of beautiful
clothes of the dead.
Attic trunk, stone well,
or metonymic moon
time-travelling for wisdom
in the Paleolithic
age, in the Middle Kingdom
or Genesis
or the time of Basho. . . . 
Instead it is a slew
of words in search
of a container 
a sleek green stalk,
a transparent lung,
a single hair's curl,
a cooing of vowels
like doves.

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