Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living

Thirty-Four

We Prefer to See Ourselves Living

Harry is starting to comprehend what he wants a poem to be, what a poem is for. He recognizes, too, that he might do this work anyway, even if he had zero readers. It’s convenient that there is an audience, since this means there is a manner in which he can function, relative to society. (As if he wanted to! Still, the thought is not without its comforts.) This is identifiable behavior, the composition of poems, not nothing. Harry trots over to the library. He encounters the silty, electrified images of Apollinaire. He thinks about the various tortured ambitions of modernists to represent the present. Harry thinks how words are objects. People make use of them without seeing them, without tasting them, without attempting to feel their hard and glossy limits.

Harry knows he wants to create a long poem. Write is, by the way, not the correct verb. He wants to assemble the poem, like a staircase. It should be a perfect and purposeless machine and it should depict the world, what has become of the world, through its intelligent arrangement of word-objects Harry has unearthed, a reporter writing about “ops tempo” or someone saying the phrase “Connecticut friends.” He doesn’t know why certain groups of words appear to him with a lasso around them, a magic circle alerting him to their pertinence. Some words mean so much more than they mean to mean.

Anyone could write the poem he wants to write, Harry thinks, if only they were willing to see what he sees. But they aren’t, and it isn’t even personal.