Every Page
- Jun 29, 2018
- 2 min read
by Robert Vivian
Every page the same one lover, every letter, every Emily dash and comma the same loved page loving now in scrawled out words, in so-called loving mistakes and rife misspellings which are just our trembling fingertips at the threshold of awe trying to get it down, trying to soar our feeling most heartfelt selves, every poem, every kiss, every curlicue and every page the same torn lover from the same swaying tree, the tree that teaches us how to sigh and how to become the wild long-haired woman in the wind and the rain and the sun, every goddamn page so that even swearing becomes a kind of sweetness, a kind of crude fucking praise, every page, every book the same crazed lover, the one down on his knees singing a ballad, the same lover holding out a bouquet of flowers in a balled-up newspaper, every page, every window, every doorknob the same lover, the same headlong phrase bent on becoming a splinter of light slashing down the beloved’s naked thigh and sentence feeling itself for the very first time not in any exclusive meaning but all meanings everywhere, woe and sadness and great fecundity and joy as if all ink is aware of itself as a dark flowing river and the black liquor with which men and women write as Johnson once wrote and the love they were made to write hastily, crazily, in all caps and no punctuation and every page, yes, every page restored to the tree it came from in the book of this teeming earth, this tome of great horizons and plenitude and every sunrise and every sunset and birds singing because they are alive and we are alive, singing the rapt and rampant madcap glory of the uncontainable world.
Robert Vivian is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy,Water and Abandon and two meditative essay collections, Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. His first poetry book is called Mystery My Country — and he’s co-written a second called Traversings with the poet Richard Jackson. He teaches at Alma College and as a core faculty member at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.
