A Minor Occurrence
Found this morning on my desk, pale even in sunlight,
not breathing: a poem, dead. Help was called and came—investigators and an
ambulance team (never before asked to cart a poem away). Around the room, walls
lined with relatives, many seeming quite sturdy, some even jaunty despite the
event, others dark and brooding, but all of them still breathing. And after
interviews and photographs, fingerprints and polygraphs, detention of all and
sundry, it looked to be the perfect crime—if crime it was.
Of course,
there was an autopsy, which really got us thinking, for when the poem was opened
up, other poems were found inside, along with, of all things, bits of prose
spread throughout the body as if appropriated from somewhere else and secreted
there—borrowed gems to brighten up a drab design. We found scraps of old texts
and documents as well: Whitman, which was no surprise, but Heidegger,
Wittgenstein, even Plato, looking not a bit the way we had expected.
From
this, the examiner suggested that the poem might have died of bloat, its slight
body unable to assimilate so much foreign matter into so fragile a receptacle.
No matter, no certainty was reached and, when done, the poem lying there
dismembered, piece by piece, no one had a clue as to what had held it together
or, for that matter, how to restore it as it had been found. For now, the poem
was deemed to have died of natural causes, although odd ones at that, and the
file left open in the event of new information.
Sadly, one could
visualize it when young, trying on new garments, borrowings perhaps from adult’s
closets, fancying itself decorative, even sophisticated, proud to parade before
the world as if authentic, independent. But there, on the examining table, it
seemed not just a poem, at all, more like the kind of extravagant creation found
on the coffee-tables of those affluent but banal. Yes, one had to admit it
seemed like something only dilettantes would find attractive, ‘foggy with
philosophy,’ aglitter with borrowings and imitation, mere brass aspiring to be
golden, a blondness not of wheat but chaff.
I was present for all of this
and felt somehow to blame. The poem was found on my desk, but it might have
perished anywhere. I even had felt tempted to deny knowing it and, perhaps,
there was some truth in that. Suffice it to say that all I told the carpers and
the critics was that I had thought nothing amiss when I looked in on it the
night before, although I had to confess I had not examined it closely, had, I
acknowledged, taken it for granted. I couldn’t help feeling culpable, but
certainly not suspect. To be sure, the authorities act as if everyone is
responsible even when there is no palpable crime. Still, if I’d been more
attentive, more proactive, more vigilant about the health of poetry, in general,
perhaps this episode could have been prevented.
If there be in this a
consolation, it is this: its death was no more important than its life. As to
that, everyone knows that poems change nothing—except other poems. One more or
less is not remarkable.
5/16-7/17/96, 2/25-26/97, 6/14/98.
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
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