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.

 

 

 

 


E·ratio · Wilkerson.pdf