NATURAL
INTELLIGENCE
The plural of anything is bound to be sharper:
countless birds spelling V above my head.
Where they land, the earth must slightly
compress,
hardening under their cool weight.
Wing-shadows held against their breasts.
Each bird only tries to be
what it is, & people call this
intelligence.
We write it down, star it somewhere in our
notes.
When our minds wander, they go alone.
After
hearing of American poet Ben Purkert’s debut full-length collection for a
while, I’m finally able to get into his For The Love Of Endings (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2018), a collection of smart,
knowing lyric poems that work through a series of meditations, explorations and
even some recriminations. “[L]ike most men,” he writes, to open the poem “DEAR
EX,” “I’ll gaze // at anything to avoid looking / inward.” The reflections are
open, wide-eyed and breathless, writing out pared down and slow-paced sentences
and line-breaks that cause the heart to pause, and the gaze to sharpen. As he
writes to close the poem “THE PAST IS THE PRESENT ONLY COLDER”:
You & I could trade places
& still the water around our lives
would be level. Someday I’ll lock
myself away, then flatten my breath
against the glass. I’ll leave a smiley
in the fog. All movies end in tragedy,
names leaping off the screen.
There
is an enormous amount to parse here, and an enormous amount to absord. As well,
there is something reminiscent of Canadian poet Jack Davis’ Faunics (Pedlar Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] in Purkert’s meditative breath and quick wisdoms, one that
allows for the essential words to emerge, and letting all else fall away. How could
one not pause at some of these lines, as he opens the title poem, the
prose-sequence “FOR THE LOVE OF ENDINGS”: “The blank page always wins.”
NO SMALL
THING
Not the heart of a place
but its black box. Not words
but wings scrawled across
a page, almost onto
the next. Am I reading
too much into night?
A star was what is.
A star looks backwards,
says the sea.
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