[Now, this next section of the novel is ruined. If you are reading this parenthetical text, my magnum opus was never finished. The reason being? The manuscript omits a poem very near to the heart of its author.
So much so, in fact, that to be without this piece is to render the entire collection incomplete. That dear to me, it was.
The poem itself was terse. Like a haiku or tanka. It encapsulated time and space and imagination. It borrowed an image from the Zen tradition, but interwove Western themes. Not accidental was the Occidental married with its Eastern counterpart.
A little missile of a poem, it reflected the infinite recursion of Indra’s Net, set in language refined and polished, like a gem passed through many hands.
It was the poem that got away.
I searched every notebook. I trawled very drawer for lines scrawled on backs of receipts or envelopes. I checkd my many email addresses, work and personal, alike. I searched my notes app. My text messages to myself. My Word Docs. Every Google Drive document. Even looked in my phone’s gallery, in case I snapped a photo of a Post-It Note.
I imagine the poem: made only of line break. No words, no punctuation. Just a page as white as Michelangelo’s prisoners. And see, these words are its corollary.
While they are clunky, cluttered, overwrought…that blank page is understated, elegant, and refined.
And I like to think I, too, have an analogue. If not “complementary,” at least my foil, philosophically.
You might find me boring, sure, but what of that Other? The Unsaid, hinted at only by my existence? A pot for every lid! But I digress.
Poem of poems! Little did I know, when the ink was still wet, that I’d written such a masterpiece. Only with the patina of memory did its import come clear.
Having written it, on the doorstep of the Throne room I stood–like a stray with a sausage (my song) stil hanging from my mouth.
I didn’t dream up this poem–I’m certain of it! And yet, at times, I’m not.
Still, I have hope that somewhere, trapped in my memory, the piece still lives.
I went so far as to study psychology and the limbic system, that I might better apprehend the concept of memory retrieval.
(“If still, you think me mad, you will think so no longer when…”)
In the end, I determined my poem wasn’t a file to download or decrypt. It was more akin to a movie set recreating a scene.
So naturally, what seemed most prudent was to set up similar conditions to those that occured when I wrote the original poem.
To do that, I needed to determine precisely when I first authored the poem. Trouble is, my working memory has taken quite the wallop from short-term videos over the last few years.
So, in the end, I could only narrow it down to a six-month period of likely origin.
I tried my best to create the conditions, the antecedents, the postures…in order to kindle my synapses, that my brain might yield its poem.
I lit incense. I prayed to Jorge Luis Borges. I idled in library parking lots to siphon off their WiFi.
For all this ritual and pageantry, my end result was pitiful. When I sat down and blinked in rhythm with my cursor, here is what I typed:
FLOWERS IN SPACE
They don’t sway
crocheted flowers in my
meditation closet.
But the dancing
candlelight makes it
appear so.
***
It is a poem. Told by a jackass, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Still, I dream of the day I replace this parenthetical text with the actual thing. That Platonic Ideal of a poem…the perfect distillation and expression of my self and no-self.
Until that day, this absolute drivel, just utter doggerel, will just have to suffice.]
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