Strong (2)

Robert Strong

from 56 Undelineated Theories of Just So Many Moments

The water clerks must still go on working in the rain. They travel out to meet ships. In description, surreal, but in reality, dull work. Damp is the fog that looks eery from a distance, from a photograph. Damp & damn cold are brought to the bone like by a semi-colon. Separate from, but related to, the skin of a water clerk. Syntax makes this work. It’s a dogsbody sort of job calling for ho-hum enjambment, wet socks, and easy dissonance. The verbs fumble and settle are all about it. Also bureaucratize. But outside the old office, plying the skiff, the clerks are up to their own. On the surface, they leave a wake of where they really went. Then silent. Then harbor. Then oil is spread for a smuggle. Bundled tight & quiet in their old wet wool—Okay—Rigging resumes the sound of itself. But there is also a problem: “conventional rain” has been taken for a subclause. This makes “imagination” must be imagined “ebbing” as a tide would. Did it? Did it have ability in the abstract and demonstrate it that practically? No: the water clerks were caught. The photograph shows it to those that know; the poem zones in more on the fog blowing.

back to 27