Aaron M. Moe

"for the tree that stands / in the earth for the first time"

2002

memory: the crack in the bathroom mirror; the phone, dangling from its cord, in the booth across the street; the faded letters of the welcome mat.

to fill the grave with the absence found amidst the crooked chair and dirty table in the back corner of the local bar

the sculpted torso: music

to listen to music the way a blindman’s fingers explore the countenance of his beloved

the question of reticence: shall your tongue speak of the primal language seething at the threshold of your throat?

One asked, “why is it that I feel like I am always leaving?” Yet another: “why is it that I never arrive?” And the two stood aghast, studying with squinted eyes the lines of the other’s face.

through the chaos of concrete, a crack streaks: frozen lightening suspended in time

the posture of an artist: a frisbee spinning in the open air

two step: a panther prowling through the jungle’s secret place of thunder

to read word is to know the robustness of wine

to climb granite is to know the texture of word

if a musician wants to approach silence, would she cease to play or play unceasingly?

language and sound are continents, poetry and jazz are coastlines, ever in the interplay with where they cannot go

the sand breathes the ocean

“But where, tell me, is the end of all these aphorisms?” he asked. “Precisely where the last grain of sand rests: in the horizon of the desert,” he was told.

aphorisms: solitary molecules floating in a hazy threshold toward that nothing where they cannot go

into hiatuses, the ocean seeps

“nexus”—N E X U S—is the only word for life: there is no center, but that of tension

somewhere deep within the musician, torment is translated into song, but the most sublime music loses nothing in its translation

there is no liberty without rhythm, no music without constraint

the perpetual seduction of the horizon

He asked, “what must I do to step from zero to one?”
“You must traverse the dizzying abyss of infinity,” he was told.

into the sand, the ocean seeps

the dictionary is the only adequate metanarrative

“x” is the only letter for life: it at once crosses out, and marks, the spot

the land collapses through the skin of the sea

to read poetry is to caress trembling skin

the crux is not that words are inadequate to articulate the unsayable, but that poetry is, in itself, unsayable

there is no depth but a surface thick with texture

there are three lovers: the climber, the musician, and the blindman

the moon spills into the surface of the sea

a drop of wine floods the mouth

the ocean, with every wave and tide, never cease carving out its own, vast solitude

two potters spinning music into skin

being known: the nexus of a deep desire and a deep, if not deeper, terror

the artist task: to be torn asunder . . . to create with the blood of passion

quote found in a math book etched along the x-axis of a graph: “nowhere is the interdependence between “ground” and “abyss” more apparent than in the simple, firm line drawn upon a simple, firm plane between two simple, firm points: (X1, Y1) , (X2 , Y2).” This he noted.

(as he noted, he saw the line slit open between the two points: all that occupied the surface of the plane spilled into the whirling maelstrom of never ending numbers upon numbers fire red and arctic blue in a black abyss—their own vast expanse of time and space)

As he continued to note, he wrote along the y-axis with a trembling hand: “glimpse ye and drown”

 

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All this work by Aaron Moe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://aaronmoe.com.