memento edere, memento edi

Vegetation, concrete,
the pink glitches of a defunct screen,
smeared clouds and their nearer brethren,
these scrolling bus-window panoramata,
their details and sums:

fruits of our visionary talent,
a world of cake for the imagination
to consume and create.

To render these in music
would be to distill their emotional spirit;
in dance, to address as in animistic epithet,
personify as in radical identification.


Seeing as painting or etching would be
to divorce image from its hierarchies,
to view the world as pure composition –
as photography, the same,
reflected in convex,
upending the artist or perhaps
erasing them entirely.


In sculpture, it becomes metaphor –
the form of anything, the content
a desperate ode to the faculty
of representation in material
semi-permanence,
and some other permanence therein.


Its equivalent in architecture would be
the perfect monument;
the burial of that idea
looking backwards and forwards with the same head.


To cast the entire scene dramatically
would involve the Herculean task
of stringing this imaginative loom
with the requisite logic of narrative;

the novel of that world would
stretch out the moment of its consumption
as long as it likes, and cackle at
its own myriad artifacts and folded ironies.


Its film would stretch on forever,
suspended not in time but itself –
ultimately liquifying as it approaches
the world it sees,
losing its viewers in itself,
in their own labyrinthine selves.


The poem alone – since it is the lone
figure whose creator is self-same –
approaches the table and eats of that world
in the same measures as its fathers.