Poetic Subjects” By Rebecca Lindenberg (America)

抄寫及攝影：盧暉宙（新語言三）

Poetic Subjects” By Rebecca Lindenberg (America)

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck.
—The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems.

My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet.

The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers.

Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns. Dr. Peebles. The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint.

The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room.

The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say, I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say, That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together.

How they talk in old movies, like, Now, listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean.

Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river
of forgetting.

Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car.

Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said, One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply, Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.