Beyond the line in the elevator
The screen in the elevator had the verse this week. "In summer, the song sings itself," attributed to William Carlos Williams. I wrote it down in the notebook I carry everywhere, wherever I was going. There had to be more to the line, and that more had to be a twist. The poem, and it probably was a poem not the result of some aphorism factory, had to twist to get to that line. Or the poem had to get there and twist away.
But the aphorism industry is very powerful. People are on the ground, and the stores on the corner do a good business even if the wall paint escaped from the carnival and went downtown. Customers enjoy the product. This line in particular sells as well as you might expect this time of year. You can find the line anywhere and take it home today.
The rest is special order. You can go through pages and pages, shelf after shelf, and not turn up more than the line. Switching departments and searching books gets you better luck. No one reads a book for just one verse. You get a book to throw the rest on the counter. Here it is, you say, I want all of it. Wrap it up for home. The clerks and the line of folks behind you laugh like you're paying with a sack of pennies. Which essentially you are. Big bills? You've likely lost them on the sidewalk.
So, let us subvert industry for a minute. Our poem is "The Botticellian Trees." The rest is here and here and here and here and other places. You can hear Williams reading the rest here. He doesn't have the voice of God, but neither does the poem. As he recites the poem as he gets older, the words get younger. You find out the poem comes at the end of a spring sequence, and the summer of the poem is the beginning of the summer, not the almost end where we are now.
The twist turns out to come earlier, nearly outside the poem itself. An alphabet becomes sentences becomes a song unrecognizing of parts. "Intersubjective space," one book calls it. Short of "intersubjectivity," the ultimate and impossible seasonal goal, there's common ground.
I imagine you write the poem, to an extent, for the rest of the year.
