“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” So sayeth the poet, writing of writing: a temporal, fleeting act that leaves indelible traces. Meaning the past is fated and writing underlines it, until the tablet and toilet paper run out. The dead stay dead, and a lot of unemployed people stay that way, too; what happens to you stays in your physical frame, and it’s always something.
Always something happening by happenstance: where and when the next tornado hits, how high the toll or rate or level rise. But odds are they will. And that a lot of other people will be born, grow up, and become writers. Does the rate of writing rise proportionately to panic? To cover the earth with the world or the word? That’s what Sherwin Williams used to do, and maybe Wallace Stevens and a few others. The poem of the mind in the act of finding a life-raft. Meaning: time and tide wait for no man or woman or others. Nor do swarms of locusts, calving glaciers, rising rivers, dengue fever, desertifying cropland, dead forests or fish. My moving fingers can’t hardly keep up. The president declares the bee to be, and the keepers just breed more of them, hide plexiglas bubbles in refugia with all the secret species. The little Dutch boy better stand there forever — if his finger moves, we’re cancelled before the next season. Instead, let us write about a vision of coronaviruses absorbing all the CO2, settling to the ground, burying themselves, and dying, perhaps encouraged by giant outdoor air conditioners. And add a mantra, if you like, or an A/C humming. “No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up” (Lily Tomlin). Like our visions of the future scramble into the past, write ahead of you. The Undertowed.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |