Kay Ryan, new Poet Laureate. This from the most recent Paris Review.
The Walking Stick Insect
of South America often loses an antenna or leg—but
always grows a new appendage. Often nature makes a
mistake and a new antenna grows where the leg was lost.
—Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Eventually the
most accident-prone
or war-weary
walking sticks
are entirely
reduced to antennae
with which they
pick their way
sensitively,
appalled by
everything’s
intensity.
2 comments:
i like the line "appalled by everything's intensity." it reminds me of a thing at the end of a denis johnson story; the guy goes to the emergency room for an overdose, sees the cottonballs screaming, says something about how objects (the vase, the ashtray) didn't hide their meanings. The idea, i think, being that this was shocking, somehow, terrifying, that nothing was concealed. i think of flowers as living things, their stems cut, sealing their eventual death, but placed in a vase to keep them alive long enough for us to admire them as "pretty" while they die. this sort of thing. when function and meaning are not concealed, it's sort of terrifying. the "intensity" is "appalling."
i also think of blindness. of canes used as antannae, so the blind can feel their way through the world. i think we all sort of feel our way through the world blind, barring any claims to absolute truth, that is.
I'm connecting to this poem on a life level. At given times in our lives we are reduced by circumstance to antennae, at that point the intensity is appalling--the way you felt Sunday.
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