April 2021
Bio Note: I am deeply committed to encouraging poetry as an essential part of a healthy
and educated mind. My involvement with the Poetry Center in Tucson (https://voca.arizona.edu/) allows me to associate with others who share that vision.
A World Without Desire
Occurred tonight for an hour only, An hour spent around the back porch Where I was sent from the family, exiled From myself. It was a world of order, Order and presence, the final meaning Of forms conversing through the night As large as all thought must be This house a ragged piece of locale Torn and adrift in the space of a dark mind. Every variety of matter floats by, The blue-silver dust motes of the moon, Distant lights of unidentifiable aircraft, Colored, small as fireflies In the tilted sheet of my cigar smoke, Vegetable flakes, dried insects’ wings, Luminous bits of debris, fanciful nuclei Circling themselves like smiling opinions Without destinations, souls that surround And surround their forgotten voyages, Sparks from a funeral fire sucked whirling In a draft, a cigar coal added To this effluvium of references Describing presence by glimmering Forms only, no destiny other than a world Without desire, a world without end, A description I could take inside Long after the family retired.
Originally published in The Wallace Stevens Journal
©2021 Michael Gessner
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