28 June 2025
Holding this one particular CAConrad poem from Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. All of the works in that collection are untitled, and the form of each one is inextricably linked to its essence, so I can't really reproduce it here faithfully. But it's the one that begins: “what would it take to / kill the imagination”—those first two lines form the top of a characteristically sculptural word shape that descends into a point marked by the word “vigor,” the whole thing balancing on the bottom two lines: “we were going to be okay / we just did not know it at the time.”
Anyway, it's the opposite of motion sickness. Motion ecstasy. That sort of feeling animates the journey from top to bottom, and I get the embodied sense of passing through a threshold, a simultaneous awareness of vitality and decay. Near its middle there's a sort of axis at: “blood I / love you / your force / the force / of blood,” a solid inflection or reflection point in the tumbling flow forward. Something about preservation and choice in relation to the inevitable and fully felt.