“Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
took a few herbs and apples.”
—RW Emerson
I want to start this one from scratch, the slight
Drag of my pen across the notebook’s length
Before I even know the words I’ll write
In that taut balance of texture and intent,
And as for subject, well, to take as found
What’s found, the common or the commonplace
Book’s all too familiar quotations, boundaries,
Like a map’s quadrants or a portrait traced
Through mullioned window panes, of what’s left out.
A few herbs and apples mumbles RWE.
The stuff that is course…adds Whitman. Then a shout
Rocks, trees wind…(a panicked HDT),
As if this partial list’s few parameters
Might underwrite such indiscriminate
Range-finding by an amateur
Who hopes for more in less, the infinite
In something almost accidentally saved:
A crow’s feather, haggard; a fungus, lipping
A bark scrap; lichen scars on birch, a gray
Skein of moss on a pine sprig. Slip
These into the notebook’s leaves… And yet
Itemization undoes syntax; the shells
Emerson took from the beach, bright and wet,
Apart from it were dead weight on his shelf,
Without the water’s glistening, without their fellows
Sharing a sentence’s wash of significance,
Written by whom? Your scraps’ long shadows
Are unnerving, as if coincidence
More than representation drew your eye
Or moved your hand lightly to set the hook’s
Double barb of synchronicity,
Tenor and vehicle caught in the one look.
A birch bit casts a saw-toothed mountain range,
A billet of locust’s a headland you might reach
In how many halved paddle strokes? Estranged,
The feather has a double ghost, as each
Flight’s lost in distance, lost in time,
Means over ends. The fern, a singular
Instance of the spiral implicit in its rhyme,
Turns the plural to the particular,
Into what’s brought home because it’s what you found,
And all those texts, freed now of their gilt-
Edged associations, the volumes around
The great camp’s library… Their sense has spilt,
Creeks into a river, and not a dam
In sight to collect yourself. You let it go,
The meaning, I mean, some convict on the lam
From Dannemora, who forgets about the snow,
And one step after another draws his own
Unwitting map across the trackless page
Of where he’s been, not where he meant to go,
As you meant to go on only to erase
What all intent implies. And since you didn’t
Mean anything, then here you are, with what
Was found and what came home unsummoned, the common
Spirits of common presence. So shut
The sketchbook, forget peaks climbed and counted, miles
Logged, forget it all except the trailing
Lines that lead the eye, at least a while
Astray. Amidst it all, your works and days
Are correspondences or nothing, stones
Where streams meet, the antique guidebook tossed
Aside on new moss, its sepia-toned
Maps that got you where you wanted, got you lost.
-Jordan Smith