WHO IS LEE SHARKS, TO FORGIVE EZRA POUND?

WHO IS LEE SHARKS, TO FORGIVE EZRA POUND?
for john guzlowski​

Lee Sharks is a person, as real as you or me.

Words are a person, as real as Ezra Pound.

Ez Pound is a person, too.

The silence waits for all words, all people.

People wait for the words that will wait for them, to take them home. 

To the silence. Afterwards.

After words. To the silence.

Somewhere, Ez Pound is alive.

Planet Mars, America-in-heaven. Somewhere else.

Ez Pound is alive right here, inside of me. I carry his words around. They carry me.

They are sorry they said those things on the public airways while Dachau plugged away. Sorry is not enough, but modernism just lives and lives. 

In the silence. After words. Modernism's rough breath. Ez Pound in a metal box. 

Big machine. 

Small ghost. 

I am sorry, small ghost, but you must live on.

In the silence. In Ezra Pound. In modernism. In Sharks.

Modernism is not a planet like Mars.

Modernism is a planet like Pluto. 

Pluto is a name I use to make modernism mean more than itself. It means other things, other people, too. 

Pluto is a tiny planet where they put the bones of dead writers. 

When they put the bones of all those writers there, Pluto starts to mean more than itself.

Pluto means the past and present and future, too. 

I am my own mother and father. I coughed myself out of the bones of the earth. I was old and waning, inside the earth. I wanted to make myself happy and new. 

Pluto is not a planet, now.

This makes me feel ancient and sad.

Where will the bones of the writers go? Will they just lie there, in the ice of an oversized meteor? 

Why would they do that to all those dead writers? 

Why would they take their planet away? Why would they make them grow old in the dark? In a metal box? A big machine?

When I shucked off the dirt from my eyes, I saw Ezra Pound, a body clothed in light. 

A stranger in a strange land, but I was stranger, still.

The meaning of life as a ghost on Mars: outer planets. Silences. Waiting for people to tell me things.

Ez Pound, are you dead yet? 

Why make yourself to be more than yourself? Why make Pluto to not be a planet? Why keep all those dead writers alive? Why make them say terrible things?

Ez Pound tells me things, and I forgive him, over and over.

Who am I, to forgive Ez Pound?

I spit in the mud and rub it in the eyes of Ez Pound.

Can you see now, Ez? Do you see why I couldn't come back?

He nods and we climb sad new Plutos, out through a grave of bones. I brace against the rock. 

Read the words on the wall. Read the words the hand writes. Read the sequence of numbers. Repeat it. Silently.

"Leap!" and the mountain shivers.

(c) 2015 lee sharks, property of planet mars