Peter Cole / Why Does the World Out There Seem

Why Does the World Out There Seem by Peter Cole

I. Why does the natural feel unnatural? Why does the world out there seem so utterly foreign to these poems? It isn’t strange, and hardly hostile, to the heart and eye behind their lines: dirt exploding into spring, leaves climbing the pipe to the screen, the morning glory’s funnel of blue, the sap of it all coursing through every fiber of all those veins. Why does the natural feel so strained when set beside the abstract figures of speech’s discourse linking us? Poems, as Williams wrote, are machines.                                 II. But maybe the natural’s not what I mean, so much as experience of the natural merged with that which men have made. No, not that. It’s registration of things one feels have already been established as facts by eyes and mind. Once is plenty. And that’s the sacred. Why the need to return to the scene of each epiphany? Why the craving for that halo? A kind of greed? Natural lines on a piece of paper are revelation enough for now, as are speaking and listening to you and what these words might say.                                 III. Extending beyond information, but also observation of that natural world that observation reveals as a miracle. Or not beyond— beside. Maybe even beneath. Or breached. That’s the thread leading back and possibly out or through: to what or whom? Him? You? I’m here, almost against my will, having been led, as though by the nose, by language. And in this abstract picture I’m asking you to bear with me. Reader. Readers. Reading. We are in this instant’s chain together.                                 IV. A chain partaking of enchantment, mystics have written, implying song, and maybe the poem. Or just a spell. Which might as easily be a hell- ish hall of echoes or mirrored images mixing in the hungry mind. Or, diversion that doesn’t feed and draws one further from, not toward, the pool of pleasure wisdom is. Depending on the poem’s design. Strange how I’ve become a modern poet of a medieval kind— making poems for a different diversion, as they point toward what’s divine.                                 V. Amusement derives from the animal’s mouth and snout, stuck there in the air, as it stares, struck by words it heard. In a manner of speaking it muzzles as in what’s not fair, or wonder. And in the illogical moment of what it means and how it works, while the mouth is closed, nourishment— if it’s serious—enters through it. And in a nutshell that’s the sentence and solace that sweet Chaucer meant. The poem’s gesture, changing, survives in generations of aspiration, leading us on . . . or into our lives. CONJUNCTIONS:50, Spring 2008 http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm