.

A Poem about Theories

or

A Recursive Glance at June 28

the afternoon sky is made of slate
and filling up with humid anticipation,
with thickening air that forfeits lungs,
with cloudy confrontations breathing
in-and-out as if to race the storm,
to trace its time by how many tire rotations
are required to reach the next sheltering tree
while pacing stone angels buttered bright
by juxtaposition, by white-against-grey
with their moss-green armies creeping
across marble eyelids and lips


and always folding thought into thought
with each up-and-down comparability
like wedging terra cotta clay into slippery slaps
of continguity, into iron oxide-infested forms
that crave the breach of * Bloomian theory *,
but nonetheless reflexively troll
one poetic influence into the next,
into intra-poetic relationships that mark
their movements by what one poet derives
from another, kneading doughy posts into
poetic histories that roll, indistinguishable
from their influence and wondering how,
precisely how, strong poets decentre canons
while misreading one another, while becoming
trespassers who preach their own visions,
even if his thesis contrives to ask a question:
do artists fail to create themselves?
and this anxious influence trills with
versified surveillance, sous valence,
for all those canonized voices
who spoke my rim, who
ambiquitously reside
inside my poems
like clipless pedals


but nothing could be more hushed
then when balancing anticipation
on two thin wheels while shifting gears
for a pumping tour de force that slides
past gravelly graphite grammars, skidding
on claydirt and derailing oily trains of words
as if to chase clouds towards the source of wind itself,
towards a thirsty third-eyed-reprieve-of-a-place
where voices divine what eyes cannot
and where my tongue curls around
the day in hopeful approximations

* Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence *