Antiphon to a dissident

I elicited an angry al-

beit evidently gratify-

ingly orgasmic response

from a fellow to whom I

wrote today, to ask why

he had abandoned rmbl -

I must be stupid since

I can't understand what

the fu** you are talk-

ing about 90 percent of

the time. There. I've

said it. Wishing you a

happy new year.

The project of my page

is not distinguishable

from those which never 

see publication; often, 

like them, it adapts no

more than coincidental-

ly to publication's ex-

pectations. It is plain

to me, that a pretense

is always available, of

one's being unintelli-

gible, given the lati-

tude someone might wish

one hadn't claimed, to

project the acquisition

of understanding. Show-

and-tell and how-to 

were never my better

classes. I don't write 

for the sake of the in-

formation. It would be

peculiar to expect this

page to betray Wolfgang

Pauli's dilemma: it is

there, but I cannot see

it. The more I fail, the

closer I am. I am not e-

ven sorry, this is hard.

I write for the sake of

those who know it is.

   The fog I call the world is not a cloud of atoms

   only, but a cloud of feelings, and ideas. I mind

   my little bumps. I grieve. I think about non-being.

   All I do is what my flesh can do, yet everything

   my flesh can do feels strange. I am the swelling

   of a salt sea onto an armature of chalk, the calm

   of a tidal pool where brain cells live, the wind, 

   the lightning storm where thought flares into thought.

   I taste damp sparks inside my tongue. If sayings

   gather under the name of Faith, or Art, I let them

   when they let me let them, and my mind clears.

Brooks Haxton, who composed this poem, thought of it as an antiphon to the phrase in the 40th Psalm, And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God. I don't think it unfair, although his lawyers might, to adapt it to the seemingly secular problems of physics, a contingent kind of loan on the strength of a noisily seconded guess, that confusion may be our style.

Brooks Haxton

Uproar

  Antiphonies to Psalms

  I Am

op. cit.