.
“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts . . . do is attempt
to find a language to come to terms with . . . the contingency
of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri; Storytelling & Forgetfullness
……………………._____________________
a story’s a trip through landscapes of malleable things,
characters bent by other characters, shoehorned into imaginations
or pulled as a potter does a pot, drawing up water and clay,
the stuff of earth, forming it into free-standing somethings
into which we pitch or place our day’s most pressing dreams,
new bouquets set upon tables in rooms we inhabit among stars
a story’s a universe skewed by future disharmonies
no matter how religiously we arrange their notes on staffs
to create harmonies appropriate to the moments
of the day they were first sung—
parcels of hopelessness and hope, foresights,
recollections—
……. Jenga game blocks
assembled or razed as our needs see fit
to salve a wound, raise a god, or
to twist instants into forms convenient
to the top-dogs of an age, or shaped sometimes
into the tales of losers,
yarns whose top billing among surviving texts
skewed by coincidence or a thing even more mysterious
which bends the arc of future tales in the peculiar direction of
whoknowswhat?
Jim Culleny
9/22/19 rev: 5/16/21
Blink 