--'Though iffy hasn't stopped me thus far.
I do find it odd still that 'blogging absolutely occludes its initial "we."
When there's an "i"phone, there is a 'blog.
Some little bit about this poem--eh, well, Cavafy and Donne in bed? Or Cavafy and Emily Dickinson in bed. Or Cavafy in bed with a fortune cookie. Or Cavafy alone in bed, in rapture, rolling onto a fortune cookie and noticing the fortune amid the crumbly bits.
One little note about the terribly lovable Cavafy: ok, he's so cool that when he's dying of throat cancer, unable to speak, his final "words" are him writing on a pad of paper: he writes: a circle, then, in the middle of that circle, a very firm dot.
So, what about a stutter out of time, or a being against its own self with only slight visible sign? As glaring (optical) as a stutter (aural). An entirely optical stutter. What would an optical stutter mean? Or what could it mean? Can it mean?
During this poem I was thinking of dots, periods, whatever, but of, particularly, that gesture. And how, if someone isn't him, isn't as Cavafy as him (damn wish I were), isn't even playing him on tv, what would that gesture seem? How would it play? As a non-final gesture: A stuttered dot. But a stutter--as we (former and present) stutterers know, ( I love how that makes what it says happen, erer....) --is in time, not simultaneous. A frustrated futurity. Repetition with compulsion. A block which will be repeated as a block until...there it is. Well, until communication of whatever sort.
Today, teaching class, I stuttered horribly, not by most standards, but by my own.[Um, the text I was teaching, first real repeated stutter of the entire year, was talking about J.L. Autsin's How to Do Thing With Words.] Whence this return? Or rather, why feel it AS A RETURN? Even though, of course, a stutter is always a return, but what if the return to a stutter isn't a return to but a re-feeling and re-flection of the pleasure of return. The younger body asserting its aliveness, a non-creepy this living hand. Well, I'm not sure I know what water I've swum into.
30
He is young.
He could be younger.
His hands shake.
Even propped on the bar.
His nights:
he stands so ready:
his face: a mark:
the close of claws.
And passed:
after a pause.
...
