My Body Was Braille For The Creeping

Without Needing To Be Theoretically Instructed, Consciousness Quickly Realizes That It Is The Site Of Variously Contending Discourses.

Debate Doesn’t Really Change Things. It Gets You Bogged In Deeper. If You Can Address Or Reopen The Subject With Something New, Something From A Different Angle, Then There Is Some Hope. ... People Are Suddenly Gazing At Something Else And Pausing For A Moment. And For The Duration Of That Gaze And Pause, They Are Like Reflectors Of The Totality Of Their Own Knowledge And/or Ignorance. That’s Something Poetry Can Do For You, It Can Entrance You For A Moment Above The Pool Of Your Own Consciousness And Your Own Possibilities.

I Rhyme… To See Myself, To Set The Darkness Echoing.

Then As The Years Went On And My Listening Became More Deliberate, I Would Climb Up On An Arm Of Our Big Sofa To Get My Ear Closer To The Wireless Speaker.

Anything Can Happen Is Also, Incidentally, A Poem That Arose From Teaching. I'd Talked About The Horace Ode (i, 34) [on Which The Poem Is Based] In A Lecture I Gave At Harvard In The Fall Of 2000 Entitled Bright Boltsand Remembered It After The Twin Towers Attack.