from The Fatalist: Time is filled with…

Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now

each of them is working on something

and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by

unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law

was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout

superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future

of poetry. Will this work? The long moment is addressed

to the material world’s “systems and embodiments” for study

for sentience and for history. Materiality, after all, is about being

a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising

while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly,

spinning to a halt micromillimeters before I watch them, my attention riveted

on getting tangled and forgetting the name of the chair, for example

and the huge young man, he is covered with tattoos

I think. Life is a series of given situations

of which the living have to take note on site

and the storytellers give an account as the wind

tangles the rain or the invaders take over the transmitter. The exchange

of ideas constitutes a challenge to the lyric ego. And so I am reporting

that I was wrong. A real storyteller never asks what story one wants

to hear, not the happy Joel nor the sleepy

Clara nor the dreamy Jane, the seductive Sam, the sullen

Robbie Jones. Nonetheless I have bought a bicycle. I have to remember

to stop. Thank you. I hope you will enjoy it. A bike that is simply locked

but freestanding will be immediately stolen. Of course

there can’t be much wrong in helping people get what they want

but creeps and purveyors of negativity

and cruelty are tucked into every institution

and most corners and though my inclination is to vote

in favor of everyone’s dearest dreams of advancement I disagree

with the remark that “deathlessness” and “fearlessness” don’t work.

I think they do. “Deathlessness” immediately invokes the “breathlessness” we thought

we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing

is life. “Writhing” is self-indulgent however

but the near-rhyme with “writing” is terrific. Don’t change that. Poetry

can’t be about flight — that would make flight a perching

instead of a flight. When one thing becomes another

the other is free to become something

else. I remember just where

we were sitting

under the influence of the wind

watching a crow

becoming something else in this case

a crow.

The state of milk in jars takes place

and the state of world affairs

can now change. No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels

but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl. Who knows? A poem

full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying.

Copyright Credit: Lyn Hejinian, “Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now ...” from The Fatalist. Copyright © 2003 by Lyn Hejinian. Reprinted with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing, www.omnidawn.com.

Source: The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003)