moving to the back of the train

moving to the back of the train

 

how long-ago answers

from when history was not designed

 

to record the same way as say

a color or a pain today

 

become much more essential

now that the memory bombs

 

drop in clusters

of vague sensations –

 

blended reconstructions

balled up

 

in before and later

or smoothed in the blur of

 

sometime on or about

like summer flowers

 

flattened in a book without a date

brought to light by a random visit

 

to Pound’s ABC of Reading

finding a violet pressed

 

against his instructions

for charging language with meaning:

 

phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia

the violet pressed there why

 

in such a slim volume except

it would be preserved

 

by its neighbors – the Guide

to Kulchur on the one side and

 

The Cantos on the other

how could I have imagined

 

in 1963 or 4 that I would have

positioned the charge of images

 

sounds and mingled words

in such a frail subconsciousness

 

moved by where those flowers grew

and I was plucking them – returning to

 

check the publication –

second printing of the 1960 first edition –

 

and the primal question of that season:

does the word dictate

 

the experience we articulate?

as in,

 

do the words find it for us

or do we find the words for it?

 

oh, dear violet, oh, dear Ezra, where

was I and what feelings are these

 

that now grace this retrograde

illumination?

 

Robin Eichele

February 2019