The Diaphanous Library / new poems 2011

Clairvoyant Of The Small (for Robert Walser)

... and yet you still somehow managed to carry on
in the small, slight, & almost infinitesimal strokes
of hard lead pencil points through failure fraught
with an unquiet dismay made even more fragile
by a progressive and existential schizophrenia
hiding behind the serenity of sanitarium walls
while all the while rending words of meaning
as you yourself shrunk away from the world
and escaped the pomp of a lexical largess
for a circumstance wrought with obscurity
where the novel idea is swallowed whole
in the space of a discarded matchbook
that burns with meaning beyond itself
and fans the flames of speculation
within which the small truths sigh
because they began contented
as the captured clairvoyance
of the irrational rationale
behind a bedlamite's
perfectly inscribed
near microscopic
and brief fictions
contradicting
a life left
to loom
large
after
all