Jody's Notes
This is interesting. (I mean, it's interesting in a self-absorbed autobiographical sort of way.) This poem was the very last of the poems that I wrote in a kind of narrative genre that I had been pursuing pretty steadily for over a decade. When I took up writing poems again some years later (in 1993, I think), I discovered that a kind of fragmentation had now invaded my poetics. So this poem involved endings in at least two ways.
This isn't the only case. More than once I'd thought I'd given up fiction forever when in fact (as I discovered some years later) all that had really happened was that I was now writing fiction in some entirely new way that I would have found repugnant before.
This evening
the sky falls softly
so as not to alarm.
The blue ceiling darkens
and scatters.
The blue crumble twilights
your ways home.
And now what?
A light supper
accompanied by tiny pixels,
all surface and flash;
your ear detects
a word or two
in the gentle patter of accent.
Meditation is no solace
for ghost reproduces like tumbleweed,
scattering its eggs
only after it has died. So too
is memory: a larva
that eats out the heart of the present.
Soon your moment is over.
You clear your throat in vain.
© 2003 Jody Azzouni