Research and Development
by Scott Wilkerson
You would not write this
as I would not imagine
these lines in crippled geometries
scaled up for another of your
comprehensive reviews.
True, there remains in all
this a civil resolution though
perhaps one without the absolute values,
that magnetic north of deepest Grammo,
a plunder of concentric betrayals and
ludic impostures; he has new material
and, some say, is his own ghost lyricist,
unspooling secretly among the marginalia of
your recipes and daybooks, folding himself
into a repertory of nocturnal maneuvers, and
looking good from a distance.
As for my own incidental involvement here,
I could say only that objects are suspended
before the gravity of your aesthetic as water the
solemnity and censure of stone.
We imagined here certain immodest claims
about the river in our history, the turn of
forgotten grace in the last instant before
a boat drifts too far from the shore,
spinning, as we all must, on chance
operations flooding through
our sacraments of logic.
It is a failed program and a failed poem,
which, for now, we will keep to ourselves.
