If you are some kind of wind--and you probably are--some kind of partnership is forming with the jealous tendons, see the bulb filament its way out hat. I stopped it here because it could not. Every poem is an instance of memory, also of getting in the way. The yaks wanted their revenge on the world through linebreaks. I will give up all my bulges for you, but not the gnawing insect of my heart. Its bell rings always at horizons without register. A package awaits me under the empty sign, should I die a cushion or the persistent narrative manner of a polluted stream. Question.


*****


Today's reading: Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions. I still haven't read much Neruda, and this late book piques my curiosity. Something a bit like an alternate Whitman in the use of repeating form (each poem composed of four or five questions, each question almost always a couplet), though the alternative is extreme (the question as contrasted with Whitman's declarative mode). Each poet employs constancy to get a wider range of possible material in than might seem possible without the formal strategy--the poem would "break" (which has an interest of its own). Neruda's questions range from jokes to childlike playfulness to surrealist impossibility to existential and political crisis. Why do I so rarely hear anyone talk about his work in the circles to which I pay attention? That fact, as well, makes me curious.