Tuesday poem #60 : Geoffrey Nutter : Strength of Materials

What is your response to literature?

How about a stingray washed up on the shore

at dawn? And a big, raw ball of oil beside it?

When did you memorize the times tables?

And the meaning of multiplicative inverse,

the circumference of a steel band around the Earth?

Listen: the wind in a band is answering their summons.

And like your sister, studying the meteorological

paradigm, the eel-like stratagems, all

the deference paid to the paragons of arrogance,

the gold-plated locks, the volumes, dusted

with pollen of columbine, that present

the work of Bunyan, cast in the similitude

of a dream--you, perhaps, are like any man

who has just been afforded a few privileges

far surpassing your station without knowing it.

Even if you are perhaps immersed

in the strange dying blooms of the Octobrist,

the leaves, the golden plums of the spirit,

so too are you corporeal, and testing the strength

of materials, the rust preventative for pipes,

pistachio essence, pine syrup, pins for watches,

plant preservatives and the repairing of pivots,

oil of rose geranium, clouds, palaces, armies,

spectrums, prodigies, and other strange

prismatic objects through which we regard

this dark star we inhabit. It is after midnight.

My gentle-hearted friend, the sky is growing tame,

and gentler in the fading light. The crickets

are shrilling in the hedgerows under the bright

unnameable planets. It is nothing. It is merely

redemption, crisis, and coherence...

it is an ultimate, eventual coherence.

Geoffrey Nutter has published four books: A Summer Evening; Water's Leaves & Other Poems; Christopher Sunset; and most recently The Rose of January, published by Wave Books. He has taught poetry at Columbia, The New School, NYU, Poets House, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in upper Manhattan.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan