~
The Conversation of Matter
I can hear things talk. When something’s lost, I
stand in the room and ask it to show itself.
Sometimes it speaks an image in the mind—a drawer
to search, a cherry
bureau to look under.
Those who have spent their lives mastering tools
and techniques can hear their material speak,
David crying naked out of Carrara marble
to be rescued from
Agostino’s botched start.
But things usually speak by resisting—
weight too heavy to lift, edge too sharp to hold,
a moving part that grinds and heats and breaks, a poem’s
application of
friction to language—
slow it! stoke it hotter than Gehenna!
salt its path with grit! keep it from slip-sliding
away on its own melt! flick sawdust into the eye
to make it dilate!
Without friction—so said
Wittgenstein, older and word-worn—language
does no work. If it wears skates on rough ground, it
takes a tumble. Even prayer needs resistance—a stick
crosswise in the throat
garbling words like a sob.
How hard to admit we love the world—how
hard it ought to be—yet its unrequiting
beauty resists abandonment: Show yourself, come out
of hiding, come out
of quarantine, and live.
~
J.S. Absher’s first full-length book, Mouth Work, won the 2015 Lena Shull Book Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society and was published by St. Andrews University Press. Previous chapbooks are Night Weather (Cynosura Press, 2010) and The Burial of Anyce Shepherd (Main Street Rag, 2006). His work has been published in approximately 50 journals and anthologies, including Third Wednesday, Visions International, North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and Dialogue. Absher recently won the Clint Larson Poetry Prize from BYU Studies Quarterly. He lives with his wife, Patti, in Raleigh, NC.