ARK, Jack Feist

ARK

Jack Feist

written in the margins of “Sunflower Sutra”

2/18/15, evening, Glenbrook, MI

to be a poet @ the end of time, when the salt has lost its savor, and sensory details have grown thin, & the outward expansion of lust for particulars dims, & flickers, & offers no flare of starburst irruption or remission from unwaning daylight to the light-sick, light-lorn world—all is the same, all is heavy, weary, tedium, sameness, repetition—

& there is no mode yet which might intone in an ancient syllable the limitless dreary abstractions of our inward flight—

my life is almost PURELY engorged w/ electronic devices, books, alerts, dings, moth-bitten blips of finger-swept text, stray images, absorptive abstractions of daydream thought, self-talk,

staged systematic orderly dramas of silent conversation—the whole thing scripted, walked thru, a thousand forks taken, shortest line plotted each time

from among the limitless known pathways, all things surveyed,—all of that, in my skullcase—

tighter & tighter the circuit winds down in a coiled linear singularity, a single thing, a rose, a monochrome cosmos of TEXT, gathering its coiled kinetic potential—

within it all of space folded up, available, arrayed most orderly and lovely a shrinking limitless rendering of continent & region,—language condensing, too, itself gathered eager tense hair-triggered for a final leaping miracle pounce

into its single hallways, mother tongue & sister tongue converging, resurrection from life to life, tongue & nation transfigured, undone, remade, a body of light & zeros—

outward no more, the greater leaps & lesser leaps inwards, the outer things charted, transcribed, reduced & magnified, rolling inwards, ever in, all of the planet and many planets, archangels and nations, the greater & lesser lights, the rolling skies, even poor Jack unshaven unkempt unmoved from the couch in days—not still, but moving, growing, expanding, all particular

motes of earthly light & dirt roll inwards, lifted, the upsurging waters, Time is a flood, on a Noah’s Ark of data—

with me, you ancient voices!

with me, you particular sons, you disparate daughters!

with me, you two-by-two, you rainbitten types, the multiple species—you giraffes and snakes and muttering things, you upright, black and white, you rain-driven last-of-your-kinds—

you ancient ones and future ones, you mighty voices—baritone, bass, complex, and rolling like these waves, you thunderers—with me!, you moth-bitten whispers, umbrellas leaking, threadbare—

a remnant is enlargening inwards, a preserved new tiny aggregate, pluriform and total—multiple, ambitious, large, unbeholden to nation or creed, beholden to ALL nations, creeds, the truth of the emergent living being, source of disparate branching creeds—

sons and daughters of Adam, Ishmael, Abraham, Cain—the heart of the thing, whatever its form—

© 2015 Estate of Jack Feist