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GARY MCDOWELL CAN POETRY MATTER There's the deluge from above, but what of the one from below? The rain's redundancy, our porous nature. Our bodies sieves for what we cannot cup in our hands, hold to our chests. So often the poem stops here, or consumes itself via mistrust, the image. I'm supposed to have ideas, things to say, causes to support. African tree frogs contain enough poison to kill every person in the world three times over; a dentist invented the electric chair; true love is a construct of Hollywood and doesn't exist. One of those is a lie, one of them is the truth, and the other some bullshit a better poet would turn into an iconoclastic moment: A detached ear pressed tightly to the floor, boys galloping terribly against one another, a goat's head swinging, but instead I'll just tell you what I know. We are nothing if we are not our ideas: The river, its rocks, what boundaries. The great calamity of it is that we can't tell the difference between what we can't explain and what doesn't need explaining. |