SECTION NINE
POETRY PAGE ONE
sm
COLUMN
FIFTY-TWO, OCTOBER 1, 2000
(Copyright
© 2000 Al Aronowitz)
(Photo © 1995, Sunday Star, Auckland )
ZERO
for Mark Peters
Not just nothing,
Not
there's no answer,
Not it's
nowhere or
Nothing to
show for it -
It's like There's no past like
the
present. It's
all over
with us.
There are
no doors...
Oh my god! Like
I wish I
had a dog.
Oh my god!
I had a
dog but he's gone.
His name was Zero,
something
for nothing!
You like
dog biscuits?
Fill in
the blank. ##
* * *
Age
the sense of trap
as a narrowing
cone one's got
stuck into and
any movement
forward simply
wedges once more--
but where
or quite when,
even with whom,
since now there is no one
quite with you--Quite? Quiet?
English expression: Quait?
Language of singular
impedance? A dance? An
involuntary gesture to
others not there? What's
wrong here? How
reach out to the
other side all
others live on as
now you see the
two doctors, behind
you, in mind's eye,
probe into your anus,
or ass, or bottom,
behind you, the roto-
rooter-like device
sees all up, concludes
"like a worn-out inner
tube,"
"old," prose prolapsed, person's
problems won't do, must
cut into, cut out . . .
The world is a round but
diminishing ball, a spherical
ice cube, a dusty
joke, a fading,
faint echo of its
former self but remembers,
sometimes, its past, sees
friends, places, reflections,
talks to itself in a fond,
judgemental murmur,
alone at last.
I stood so close
to you I could have
reached out and
touched you just
as you turned
over and began to
snore not unattractively,
no, never less than
attractively, my love,
my love--but in this
curiously glowing dark, this
finite emptiness, you, you, you
are crucial, hear the
whimpering back of
the talk, the approaching
fears when I may
cease to be me, all
lost or rather lumped
here in a retrograded,
dislocating, imploding
self, a uselessness
talks, even if finally to no
one,
talks and talks.
From Selected Poems by Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author. Originally published in Windows (New Directions, 1990).
Copyright © 1997-2000 by The Academy of American Poets
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