Anne Tardos “Beginningless,” a new poem from The Camel’s Pedestal

Life is a raw event

I give you roses    You give me roses

As I speak and as you listen

I feel the traction of my words in the terrain of your mind

We speak of the great emptiness which is ultimately empty of itself
(It is not reality either)

We discuss the limits of thought The paradox of expressibility

The familiar

the habitual

we appropriate

Our mental attitudes then crystallize into instincts Detached observation of brilliant force fields

Luminous displacements

The ride of a lifetime

   The buzz of electricity

      The comfort of oblivion

         Staring at the ocean

            Inhaling heady sea vapors

                The fullness of time

An increasing sense of urgency

Inexplicable in light of a conscious attempt at slowing down
As if deceleration itself suggested friction

Who am I and what do I mean by who am I?


Hume Human

Creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of

compounding

transposing

augmenting

or diminishing

the materials afforded us by the senses and experience

The muddy particulars of experience continually give us new material to digest assimilate reject or rearrange in different degrees

Like seaweed, we undulate

We discuss zero, a finite moment fixed within our infinity

We say our infinity as we would say our solar system or our galaxy
We sense that each instant covers the entire world

We know that life doesn’t happen to us We happen to it

And what we make of all this stuff is up to us

Our inventions tend to be arbitrary

Much is about restraint and mindfulness courtesy

empathy

focus

Not to give in—not to succumb Not to wallow not to slouch Not to slip not to fall

I have nothing better to do than to be here now.

Delicate gene pool

  Glitter kindness

   Unexpected chemistry Thought exists

    Rigid necessity

I surge forward, feeling an elastic exhilaration.

This is the current situation as it stands:

Everyone I’ve ever been I am now
All kinds of inspirations and illuminations,

Points of clarity and rays of grace

I don’t know a better point to start from.

note.  Anne Tardos’s The Camel’s Pedestal: Poems 2009-2017 was published earlier this year by BlazeVOX Books.  Of these poems & of what Gary Snyder has called: the “real work of modern man: to uncover the inner structure & actual boundaries of the mind,” John Olson writes: “ There is a splendid lucidity to Tardos’s writing, a jesting, inquisitive spirit nimbly examining the relationship between language and reality in inventive articulations that jingle with wit and perceptivity. Lines like ‘I am lost in a desert of my own making’ and ‘Do words work as wood works’ juggle phenomenology, advancing what Tardos observes as ‘the true state of things expressed in phenomena but inexpressible in language.’ Contradiction, paradox, incongruity; it’s all here, the entire caravan of linguistic apparatus crossing the dunes of this enigma, this desolation of self-awareness, this epistemology of dromedaries on the very edge of things. This collection is well-crafted, precise, imaginative, clear. I feel a great intelligence moving among these words. It’s exhilarating. This is the kind of work that inspires me.”