Jody's Notes
So here's a major theme for me: loss. I write about loss a lot. In all sorts of forms.
(And this is real--it's not an artificial theme I decided to adopt because I could generate a lot of poems about it. It's where I live emotionally, as it were: I live more where all the things I've lost are than where the things I haven't lost are.)
It's a bad idea, a really bad idea. To be like this. I don't recommend it at all. Take people, for example. The people you've lost are gone. So they don't care how you feel about them. It's the ones who are still around that matter. Who are resentful (for example) because you keep thinking about other people instead of them. I can see why that would be irritating. I sympathize. Totally, I mean.
People often tell other people to live in the present. To smell roses, for example. I don't recommend that, exactly--but ...
Anyway, this poem is an example of "pushing it" as far as it can go. (Aesthetically, I mean.) It's the sort of thing that I usually describe as "cute" when I see it in someone else's work: A nonexistent being experiencing a sense of loss because it now exists.
Nostalgia, as it were, doesn't get much weirder than that.
This poem was reprinted in my collection, "The Lust for Blueprints."
Existence is a perfection. —Descartes
Being has had its way with me
and I am thick with the flesh of it.
I have packed away God-ish things
for they are not the case.
Like everything else
I am trapped by tautology:
I am here now.
Even so,
light has other aspirations:
no one can put a finger on it
and yet it seems to illuminate everything.
I see how every eye
is greedy for hallucination
and it pains me,
for once upon a time
I too was a joy to behold.
Museums are anathema to me,
for I am hopeless about perspective.
Smugly flat, the fat Rubens have it all.
By contrast, I am thingy in my rage:
I am jealous of holograms,
avoid mirrors, and scoff
at water’s impoverished transparency.
Nonexistence is a state of grace.
Without it, my nostalgia cannot violate logic.
Nonetheless
I am substantial in my reservations.
© 1998, 2001 Jody Azzouni