"Some Consequences of the Made Thing" by Dan Beachy-Quick

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 31, 2017   Some Consequences of the Made Thing   Dan Beachy-Quick

The End. Above these words the sky closes. It closes by turning white. Not The white of all clouds or being within a cloud. White of worldless light. The End. Feel a silence there that reminds you of a scent. Crushed grass the hooves galloped through Or is it the binder's glue? Some silence never not real finally can be Heard. Silence before the first words. Precedent chaos. Or marrow work. Or just the sound of the throat opening to speak. Like those scholars of pure water Who rode through mountains and meadows To drink from each fresh spring a glass And then with brush and ink wrote poems On the differences of sameness, You too feel yourself taste the silent page Of the end and the silent page of beginning. They taste so much of whiteness never more White than white that's been lost. You have some sense of the book Altering, page sewn secretly next to page, Last page stitched to first. O, earth— It rolls around the solar scroll Turning nothing into years and years into Nothing. At The End you're a witness to this work That wears the witness away. And who are you Anyway. Pronoun of the 2nd person. Lover, Stranger, God. Student, Child, Shade. Something similar gathers in you. Another way of saying I in a poem— Of saying I in a poem that realizes at the end That I am just a distance from myself. And so are you. That same distance.            Copyright © 2017 Dan Beachy-Quick. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "For a few years now, I've been studying ancient Greek, and one of the small discoveries that has felt of earthquake magnitude to me isn't only the well known etymology that the word for poet (poietes) means 'maker,' before it means 'poet,' and so makes of the poet one whose work fundamentally is building, but that the verb related to that noun, poieo, which in the active voice means 'I make,' has a different meaning in the middle voice. The middle voice, not present in English, might be thought of along Keatsian lines—it is when a verb's action is performed against itself, and so is active and passive at once, the doer and the done to. In the middle voice poieo means 'to consider.' So it may well be the poem is the thing that must be built in order to consider it, a space in which thinking cannot occur before the setting down of the lines, and so of feeling, too. This poem, one of a loose set of such, ponders the consequences of that possibility." —Dan Beachy-Quick   Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of gentlessness (Tupelo Press, 2015). He directs and teaches in the MFA program at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Poetry by Beachy-Quick   gentlessness (Tupelo Press, 2015)  "My Philosophy of Life" by John Ashbery "The Big Book of Therapy" by Bob Hicok "Everyday Escapes" by Dean Young Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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