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a
poem by
Ace Boggess
> bio
If I Am Something Else
"If
I am changing, I am no longer who I was;
and if I am something else, it's obvious that
I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly
write to strangers."
-Rilke
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I. |
Will you know me, you readers of poetry,
though I've changed? As you sit, bespectacled,
squinting at thin veils of text that obscure this page,
as you mispronounce my name, I beg you:
remember the many eyes, lips, moons & life-
measuring coffee spoons that brought me here. |
II. |
Future
he-is-survived-by or he-was-a-widower-of,
do you shiver to see the one of me that is & is again today
a different one of me than yesterday? You cannot see me
through the change; else cannot see the change through me:
you are Vitangelo Moscarda's wife who,
in all their indifferent-loving years,
never warned him of his crooked nose. |
"Oh, lots of other things!"
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III. |
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I write for you, beautiful cafe-syrup-farmers
tilling your fresh-ground: for you, I'm a monument
to exactness (even were I to contemplate the crème
de menthe, the tantric mango tea, the honeyed goblet).
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IV. |
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I said to my profane mistress, I was more of you
in you than me &, absent years from the me-in-you,
I write to map that passed-by place, to recreate
my lost in-you in you, as well in me.
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". . .a broken heart
will run to many editions."
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V. |
Have I changed so much? How difficult making tea
one-handed, still possessing two: the cleansing-the-vessel,
the water-filling, bag-peeling, the dip, the watch, the pour,
the stir-- we who sip this tea cannot appreciate. |
VI. |
O, what songs for the red enchantress off by herself
in an unlit room- she who dances while blind men talk trivia
past her open door: they miss her mysterious,
sensuous spectacle as if she has made herself milkweed, &
they will not smell her fear, her fear, her. . . Yes,
for her: a stage in ink to spotlight her insatiate dance,
her ceremony of innocence, her soul abroad in such an ecstasy. |
VII. |
Surplus elegies also for that gray-fish-slick-eyed gentleman,
long dead & lingering, drunk on his nightly bitterness.
He nods, mumbles, conjuring misery with muttered anti-
sutras. Yet such a classic was his vintage model: sprightly,
vital, that forgotten man who once enjoyed the penny-
like taste off blues harps blown with the rapture &
wrath of gods. Young Horatio lost, he now haunts
darkened corners while, each night, I mourn his passing
in another of my linear psalms if I have no coins for Stroh's. |
VIII. |
You Nine Billion Curses! You Dark & Strange Matter!
You Soundless Syllable, Smallest Particle, Subject & Object!
You debatable concept & barrier between the words of men-
I'll not invite you here: an Unmoved Movement. |
IX. |
"You taught me language & my
profit on't is, I know how to curse!"
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"Goddamned lying son-of-a-bitch!": I'm said to have
said, age three. I must write to you, Grandfather,
teacher who gave me not freedom of language
but freedom from it. I write to you who memory
can't verify ever spoke these words I learned or any:
voice the gritty silver-orange stillness of old photographs.
I write from my inheritance, write what words you left me. |
X. |
"[S]pirit is creative becoming."
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I've changed so much since I began: I'm changing.
I smell death everywhere like fresh-cut grass
at start of rain. Each breath pulls more in.
Each breath: a transformation. I can't recognize
myself in words once written by a different man,
left unvarnished or not yet nailed in place.
Though I hoped to say more on somesuch &
whatnot, a stranger now to whom I can't write,
I must cling to my silence like a suspect in custody,
never to finish this treatise expressing what,
moments ago, I thought I knew of. . . |
"Everything that
takes place in the spiritual world
takes place in me."
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