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Page 16

It's a poet's job to make connections
(me to you; blank to black, thing to no thing),
so he puts things down on the blank page,
where he can connect them up (islands
becoming continents). But why bother?
What could connect more fully
than blankness to blankness,
one blank page (in our minds)
not the brother, but the SELF
of another? Can you tell this blank page
(or the blank page it once was)
from the next?

But that's too much connection, too easy.
Where's the game in making nothing
of nothing, linking absence to absence?
I am not here. You are not here.
Can you distinguish your absence
from mine?

(Although I like to think I could tell
a disembodied asshole from a
disempastried donut hole from a
hole in the ground. Is this a groundless
assumption?)

We write to interpose barriers. Blank
is NOT black, so can be discovered to be
its kin. Isn't that the crux of every melodrama?
"Luke, I am your father." And the word was
light, and the darkness knew Him not.
"Oh well, there's always tomorrow" --
another blank page. (Or as the lascivious lady
muses amid the gilt of her hotel room,
"Another day, another page
boy!")

Note: And perhaps you've noticed that ending a rather profound or profound-sounding ramble with a silly play on words (page, pageboy) is another failed attempt to make nothing.

In the last stanza above, "Luke, I am your father" is a line from the movie The Empire Strikes Back, second of the Star Wars Trilogy, spoken by arch-villain Darth Vader to the hero, Luke Skywalker. The stanza moves from there to the Gospel of John to the close of Gone With the Wind. How the stanza does this, I don't know. I'm just the magician's assistant.

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