Notes on Aesthetics
Someone once offered me the following feedback:
You are letting the syntax slow you down. Syntax
should be used, rather, to speed one up,” &, “This feels like
a closing-down when this poem s. b. opening up @ the end.”
But there is something to be said for sitting
for untold, uninterrupted hours on a bench drinking
-in a piece of artwork until the headlighted rush
of its inbeing unfolds itself, strata of subtexture —
a fleck of sky upon a lip. & though they should in-
stigate a quickening below the surface, sentences needn’t rush.
What we think is language is language
the way photosynthesis is an exchange between aura & rebus.
Cracked straight from the spiky feelers — or are its prongs
called “arms?” — aloe vera to assuage the skin of sun —
this is meta — but how to trepan the moon
from my psyche, to relieve me of my iconographies,
my personal fetishes? Dontcha know, Gorgeous,
the first rule of (literary) seduction is to not seduce
yourself? Which can loosely translate into the need: to come
to oneself coldly. I keep a glass of water on the nightstand
because ghosts are often thirsty, but even they don’t want
to beg. When I read that the last image one sees when one dies
imprints itself upon the recently deceased’s retinas for a spell
after — I thought of the connective tissue
between vowels & consonants. When it comes to instant
gratification & Boschian delights, I try for as long as possible
(& not one nanosecond longer) to stave off ecstasy — then,
I eat the whale, bite by bite.
ξ
Aesth., Cont.
“What are we thinking? What are we telling ourselves, and where does this inner voice come from?”
– Look Into My Eyes: How to Hypnotize Anyone by Peter Masters
Drama’s inherent in the form.
Or it fails to be.
When R said, You’re my favorite
tart, it was the sweetest
thing she’d ever said to me,
so I knew it was a compliment
to be taken with a shot
of tequila to the heart.
It’s not what you say but how
you Gerard-Manley-Hopkins it:
the dove dove a bow to bow
& arrow. If it’s not content,
then it’s tone. If it’s not con-
tent, then it’s sad,
if not downright lamentable.
The ox-
cart hitched before the ox? Con-
text. Like a dust-
cloaked cuckoo clock
in the basement cawing
its thirteen evermores, tex-
ture accrues below surface
but it’s image that’s haruspex.
When asked what he missed
most on his 200-day space tour,
the astronaut answered, not “Sex,”
but: “Bird chirps & cafe noises.”
Still vexing, however,
is: is a bathtub a bathtub
on Mars? [1] The way any
log is haunted by the woods
it once was. Are not (at least
in writing) questions
oft rhetorical & heightened
elocution self-executing,
Molotov? How do you know
you’re not already hypno-
tized?! interro-
banged the palm reader.
Keep the key
skeletal, the map a fragment,
& the door ajar with a jar
of pennies: i.e., compose for
the retina but hone
for the cochlea inner ear. There’re
abandoned ghost-
nets that, fait victorious, agog,
insatiable, continue to trap
lobster & fish.
Anchored yet adrift, crates
lopsided with gill & claws
scissoring. O, suffering’s
like air but syntax’s levitation.
Don’t (try to) explain away
mystery. To extract emotion, to
exact the abstract?
Drop your grief into a bucket.
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[1] From Stephen Dobyns’ Best Words, Best Order: “There is an old conundrum that asks is a bathtub a bathtub on Mars? Implied by this is the idea that something is defined by its function.”
ξ
LGBTQ+ writer, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy is the author of Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin, and Greenest Grass (or You Can’t Keep Killing Yourself & Not Expect to Die), which was the winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry prize, forthcoming 2022. Her poetry will/has appeared in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and others.