I am a survivor of my own ignorance

like everyone else. Our participation

and consequent points of criticism

outline these years, unironic

and with full sincerity. Well...

there was this time when you 

left your mark, and it was 

as insignificant as it was otherwise

to two or three others before you

grew out of it and into a different set

of roles, projects that ended or were 

consumed whole with our inflating beliefs 

strategically curious in choking their host 

only so much as they will still be able to swallow.

Then it was as if a great wind picked up

the constituent pieces as ornaments

and arranged them across the domestic

apparatus in the shape of a smile. 

What use is a tree if not 

something to fall into? 

There's a pocket of undisclosed pleasures

aloft and ballooning over roofs and heads

just beyond reach. Or at least I like to think

so, no longer waiting to come up with a

more rational explanation for the deviations

of my personality. It's postmodernity that has me

wrecked. A smile that could have been 

anyone else's fades into itself, a smile

upon a smile, laughter upon laughter,

a stand of forest, distant yesterday, 

arrives as sudden as waking, delivered

at the front steps, then dissolves

with every passing day, maybe less

of itself, maybe more, branches or

the wind between them. The price of fire

…sorry, the price of firing a Taser

is $70 a shot. A rainbow breaks through

the window and moves gradually across 

my desk until a little after 3PM. 

                                                [Brooklyn, 10/20/19]

To speak gently with you

makes the whole world again

accessible for a moment. 

The spine straightens and shoes

settle evenly on the surface

counting back up from zero to ten.

Health's unlifted veil doesn't conceal 

what's horrible or loathsome, not amplifying 

what's beautiful or even insignificant 

to notoriety. We are occasioned with

a clarity more like generosity, like

closeness, like we've hopped to the bottom of

a well to gather water where it's coolest,

directly from the source, only to look

back up what we thought was this deep

perforation in the earth and see we are still

standing in the open and vibrant field

of the world at hand. This is true

recognition, where the thrill of words

is felt when they emerge without

pulling them from within and are offered

from the world to the world. We are left

now with a memorial to this thinking space

errant ideas once occupied, the dispassionate

air in which small, cumulative judgments were 

made about people and things—you know—like

what I think about you. I remember this summer.

It was more of a feeling than a vision. A red rope

knotted with a variety of connections. What was 

just enough something to be even more

nothing? There's peace in reconciliation, 

I hope. I keep hearing that Skeeter Davis song—

it's the only one I know—"The End of the World."

It would be somewhat ominous, another forecast 

for our increasingly lubricated suck into finality,

but it's a song of the immediate aftermath

of heartbreak, of lost love and hopelessness,

true tragedy that doesn't change or waver for 2 ½

minutes. There is nothing more perfect

than a song that doesn't change its mind. 

Romeo and Juliet are dead when the play begins,

"star-cross'd lovers take their life," and we watch

anyway, knowing no matter what allusions

or other simple delights can be drawn from

this work, the future is transmitted in a crystal of the present,

and we are its engaged monitors, disclosing

more of itself to itself. There is no sudden death,

no startling violence to apprehend. Like Fulci's

promise of a lathe through the eye, we see it coming.

It's like generosity, like closeness. And however struck 

one can be in the mirrored room of eternal transfigurations,

it's as Reverdy writes, "the same and single voice persisting 

in my ear." 

                                                            [Brooklyn, 11/26/19]

Ted Dodson is the author of An Orange (Pioneer Works / Wonder, 2021), At the National Monument / Always Today (Pioneer Works, 2016), and Pop! in Spring (Diez, 2013). He works for BOMB and is a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.