The point of a poem is to become wordless, to find
the rounding out that assimilates reductiveness and
assertion to an unspeakable whole: the end of the poem
is to reconstruct silence, a cure of words, to subvert
the fragmentary, discursive, partial, definitional
into stance and feeling: when the stance of a poem becomes
whole and still, its motions are like travels of light
and surface through the aspects of a piece of sculpture:
no act of analysis sees the whole at once: the poem
reconciles, ends, and holds its motions: its images
lose their sharp edges and colors into the tones and
moods of landscape, into the inexhaustible suggestiveness
of impressionism: the end of a poem is to lose itself
in itself, to give over the partialities of rhythm,
image, and sense to coherences words can give no access
to and have no access to, a place where the distinction
between meaning and being is erased into the meaning of
being: what a poem says may be its least and most
misleading ploy: how it holds its behavior opens the poem
up to indefinableness and inexhaustibility, ontology
and teleology become one, to the focused point where in
mulling over and meditating on the poem we can sort
out its behavior and ours and define for ourselves what
we like and don’t and return our definitions to criticism
and instruction, idling, and waking nonchalance.
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