Listen:
I am going to tell you something.
You will not repeat it. You will be lucky
even to survive. I am going to speak
the words that made the world, that lit the void
and ordered it, and every pulse in your body
will be as the tide. When I speak
your heart shall hear and strain
to answer. When I speak you will understand
all human souls in all their languages crying
like a wood of birds in evening,
and every word is lonely, lonely.
You will hear the sky arch in answer,
hear how the thunder cries out:
bones, come together. Bones,
take your order.
You will not say this. Seal up
the thunder. Your words
are a code for breath, they stir
the lungs and tongue -- they cannot
make the stones bleed water, or stop the sun
in a blaze past colour. Mine is the word
that made the clay curl up in fingers.
How can you answer? Be still
and I will make an oak of you.
Be still and I will put a bolt through you
and turn your lungs to hands of lightning.
Put my book like a stone
on your tongue. Become
salt. Savour.
_____
This felt like one of those poems, a la "While the Earth Remains" or "Suffrage to Water" that was going to sprawl out everywhere and need to be cut down to the quick. ("Sprawl" in my book being "go more than a page or so.") But, durn it, it was interrupted by a Person from Porlock (okay, actually a phone call from Porlock) and now the poem is just spinning unfinshed. So I'm unhappy with this. I tapped something, and now I can't get hooked into it again. Argh!
The Love Song of J. Alfred Porlock
Let us go then,
"Mine is the word that made the clay curl up in fingers."
This is wonderful stuff--the kind of poem that gives you a kind of clenched excitement in your stomach as you anticipate being wallopped.
Why do you think it's unfinished?
Yes, why?