27 November 2004. Today, a return to a Poem poem I've posted versions of here before. It began as a poor parody of the kind of jump-cut scatter of what seems to me automatic writing of Jorie Graham, or at least the poem of hers I used as my model. After fooling with it, though, I found what I thought were worthwhile trails of coherence in what I wrote, so emphasized and smoothed them into (what I considered) reasonable unity to make a fairly standard Poem poem of them. Yesterday, however, I came across an early draft with its scatter still intact and liked it. I noodled it into the following wide poem:
Poem Takes Stock
Poem returns, scathed his thoughts
unfiled rain quotientless
postponed trigonometry lingering. . .
The unknown whereabouts of palaces uncompartmentalizing possibility,
the swart judges taking nothing complete down to the robes
Poem returns, and returns. He takes stock:
May is the fifth planet from the sun more known to the Aztecs than "than"
sine comes in later the prefix, "although," remains to be heard from.
is there a name in long division for the product of the divisor and sunlight?
beyond the dividend, beyond how, Poem heals:
spring is
can anything? the ancient Egyptians?
slain Aztecs? slow remainders who formalize the concern
sine concern
(Poem understands without) somewhere the glide of a canoe,
the abiding "although," the wrench and plumb:
the lament is no longer his.
Regardless of the cities sufficiency persists.
among multiplicands of crows, Poem strides Pythagorus almost
always, eventually, the felt answer, the hum of honeybees
the drowse toward
the untaught sunlight
unlawfully naming
stones and stones and stones
into audible
affirmations
I think I like this version better than my previous "final" version (from 17 July):
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