I found myself trying to write about something, which is always a mistake. I lose all grace and instead plod along in earnest prose making some painstaking point painfully and yet missing it. Missing the point, which is not a point but a wave, or a confusion of waves, or an eddy of points and waves, or some such unutterable thing because if it were utterable I would have just said it but instead mumbled this other obvious blather, feeling virtuous and knowing. It’s the not-knowing. It’s always the not-knowing. So I have to begin again, and move beyond my knowing, into and into and into the question. What is the question? Well, that is often the question. I’ll take a breather and move back into this about-thing some other day, less gray and dismal, less in the deadzone that is the last week of the calendar year. Maybe January will inch me closer to some words and some image that might indicate the question, so I can leave behind in 2025 that poor, earnest knowitall who is myself.

Here’s a poem by Ted Mathys that I found in the Bennington Review that I admire for its confusions, its play, its distracted looking about, and how it stumbles down the page, as we do along the sidewalk on any given day, finding recollections, losing track, having conversations in your head.

Fluencies

Ted Mathys

I am a person
on whom nothing is lost.
By whom it’s been lost,
the nothing, I’m unsure.
Like a suntan it just
appeared on my arms.
Now I carry nothing
beneath my routine.
When I place a cabbage
in the shopping cart
nothing mimics the gesture.
Nothing sleeps as I sleep.
I never ask after its owner
because nothing is an echo
that will, given time,
reinfect the source.

✦

She gave me
the cold shoulder.
I cradled it in my palms
like an ostrich egg.
I knew I was to protect it
until she gave the word.
When she gave the word
I placed the word
along with the shoulder
in a small cooler
with an ice pack
and took it to the pier
jutting into the lake.
I removed my feet
from my shoes,
the shoulder from its cooler.
I let the sun go to work
but kept the word on ice.

✦

I jumped the gun
I found in a cornfield.
Winchester lever-action
rifle with wooden stock,
it rested in a furrow
between shorn stalks.
I got a running start
and when I leapt
I saw in the distance
a scarecrow, mouth sewn
into disfigurement,
staring back.

✦

I threw my voice
in a tight spiral
from my spot on the field
toward an older man,
a version of myself
idle in the end zone,
hands in the air.
My voice arced
over fresh cut turf,
its spinning laces
speaking in tongues.
He caught the answer
to a question I lack
the language to ask.

✦

I ran out of time
to say what I meant
so kept running
until I entered
a vacant space
faceted by blue light.
It was once a parlor
where moods were kept.
Solemnity, irreverence,
sadness, too.
I searched for self-
delusion, as if it were
a mood and not,
as I knew, a condition.
But the parlor
had been swept clear
into mineral-blue
absorbing distance.

https://www.benningtonreview.org/fourteen-mathys