The Fatalist

Dog isn’t right, poetry isn’t wrong — words in themselves
can’t be right or wrong. If writing is to serve as their chief
interrogator it must ask the very questions
regarding puppets or cookies that we would ask
with a three year old dashing toward us
with confidence. We would have to be armed
with questions and the artistic courage
that is required to sustain them. Then things will surface
like the scraps of paper on which they are written and ambition
afloat on mineral water left over from the party – we all remember
the preparations before and the cleanup after the fire. Brown by day
and red at night, the sky came within 500 yards of the conscripted
convicts. We gave them everything they asked for when they approached
the fire through miles of brush in prison garb
and guarded by deputies thinking us naive to be grateful for something
they’d been condemned to do. Things weren’t yet working
but I knew how to fix the problem. It was structural
as when I was in high school sitting in the town cemetery
which lay pretty much midway between the sentimental verses
on the gravestones and my fear of death. Figures distinct
from reality (which wouldn’t have suited adolescent girls)
hover over courage like the ibis. They sneer
and we thank them — as we must
since one of them lay the cosmic egg that contained the bird of light
that we now use to search for better spacing, wanting the sense
of suspense, of preparation and promise, the sense of things
underway, which means we have to get our indentations
right. But as you see, they might as well be in Florida — the same time zone
as yours — like manuscripts suddenly appearing on the horizon
in a box of loose pages they are still a long ways off.

-Lyn Hejinian, from "The Fatalist"