“What’s Poetry Like?,” by Bianca Stone

By Bianca Stone

Read by the author.

Poets play the winter tarantella,making love in the midnight hourson a white iron bed like a dog skeletondistinguishing the essential and unessentialmoment, shared between ordinary lunaticsand screaming over a bird in an apple treeuntil an elegy has to be writtento resuscitate the relation—those who looktoward the depleted wildlife of neighborhoodswith tragic relish, to see somehow ourselvesdisappearing about ourselves.

Once, in New York City, years ago,the Internet technician finally arrived.His teen-age apprentice stood in my living roomover a Tranströmer book. He said it lookedkind of cool, and he wanted to knowwhat it was. “Poetry,” I said.“What’s poetry like?” he asked. Andthe treacherous inadequacy with which onefinds oneself explaining in a few loosedeficient words something with lungsand no face, the immortal freakof language you haunt and huntwhich is the original state of languageyou’re trying to get back to from within—poetry, whose rare geniuses comeas bittersweet suicidal explosionson the tongue, randomly felt duringlong, tedious meals; award-winning andalready forgotten. All the emoting of theunanalyzable fragments. All the surrenderand detonations of precisionand reckless insightand reference to hidden wisdom and Coke cans—conversations across time, and slipsinto truth, and obscurity of thought altogetherblissful, the form itself at its best strings of dreamsin the waking life,overlaid like unobserved clothing:the words that singstillness, the silence cravedby perpetual auctioneers—that which is notthe tale of event but itself an event—

“You know what? Just take the book,” I said finally,pushing it into his hands—

“THANKS!” he said, and took it away, grinning a little.

But later, with snow in my head and a thunderin my right eyelid . . . I was worried, as I wasso dangerously then, about dark, yet-unspoken things—it frightened me: that shiny black and white bookwafting around New York City in the backof a Time Warner Cable van, waiting to be opened,waiting to torment him, thinking of it changing his life.