Rebecca Kosick

Say It

If the word is

  visionary

According the power

  of sight

In the tradition of

  The Apocalypse of John

you’ve gotta tell somebody what you saw

Maybe you saw

  the future-world

the practice-whirled

  dividing the between

between the day and

  the dream

Instead of trying to represent

  the concrete world

the world

  is going to see

a fusing of fragments

  that represent a broader translation

giving birth to

birth 

Birth giving birth to

  another

end

Look,

  look and sight

a slight testimony for the

  night

Measure

  Contradict

the text creates

  borders

and the borders

  order

We have to use language

  and in that way

we are insufficient

  intermediate

to whatever happened

  Tonight is the insufficient

commemoration

  of a ritual we’ve forgotten

that marked the reality of words

The word was already in

  the beginning

and without her

  nothing got done

A liquid world

  already in dialogue

just waiting to get it over with

  Why sing the word, oh poets

it never needed us anyway

Words don’t think things

  We are things

Do you think

  there is an important antecedent to

the creative act

  I don’t

the word is already displaced

  but we have the potential

possibility

  possibly we have the

Is it a night thing?

  Maybe it’s a night thing

late and disorganized

  but closer to the self

than the desired self

  Hey! you over there

You inhabit me

but you are the night

Bearing barring this,

  I’m saying, okay

outside of us

  lives

what we previously thought

  could be a gap between

me and

  you

If you take the gap

  then what we have instead

is a real fucking abundance

of stuff

Jesus get them out of here

  On the next page

we’re way beyond the margins

  Take the line

and extend it all the way past the page

  Look at you, way over

there, filial to finally

John hears the trumpet

  but there’s no one to open the book

But what I’m trying to say is

  we’re way past the book, John

We’re over here

  permeably

permanently in the weeds

Can I make a small suggestion?

  that day could be night

that grace could be

  the impious procession

that precedes the act

The Snail

The present indicates an object

But, during its history, it was flexible

We apply ourselves to antiquity, and

Then we don’t

The technical is vivid

But then it’s not

This is a rhetorical handbook, although

You know, it’s not

“Vivid descriptions” are central to poetry, but

They don’t have to be

As far as I know,

There are plenty of opportunities to drop it

To generate a land rich with points of view

Gazing out upon nothing

No cosmopoietic space, no jagged rural place, no

Various ecstatic feelings

For this study, I would like to look at nothing

Put a definition in conversation

With “representation”

We wanna ask if this is shapely enough but

Not touch the shape

Corporeal conceptless clarity

Visual representation works, say,

In general terms

But if you parallel the expression

With its own critique, then

We have a formal freeze

Superimpose your time on my time, and now

We’ve got a boss relation 

And all my poetry is against work 

Instead, let me introduce you to the pause

We’ll take it on somebody else’s dime

We’ll take in somebody else’s fine

We’ll still it

This poem is useful to us because

It questions the value of the visual

Here is a snail but it’s also pure gold

It’s got a gold shell, it’s a gold guy

I can’t produce it here but

It can make me a gold girl

Which demonstrates precisely

The possibilities of language

But how do I touch it again?

Never mind, all it will say is “we are real”

Who is we? We don’t know.

Judging by the way things are going 

We are in a frustrating stasis,

Calm before the catch

Try to reach your hand out

In the end there’s no ball

We’re just letters

Did you think this was real?

Hate to break it to you,

Words can do barely anything

This isn’t a snail, it’s just a bit of storage

The body is a barometer—

Superfluous

We’re all about the shell

There’s an identical one over there

A primary reproduction

Like, you could probably afford it

  There’s a big possibility that 

Visual representation is

Not complicated at all

Being a plurality of copies is nice

We see ourselves in we

We’re a fugitive referent,

Really-nilly, impeccable stuff

The snail expresses qualities

perceptible to the sea

Which in turn holds a “secret treasure”

The physical qualities of the snail

Have nothing to do

With the value of a gold guy

Check the fantastic form of the thing

It could be any old gap where idolatry creeps in

“Snail” does exactly the opposite of

What snail wants to do

Give it a rest already

We’ve got the five senses

But the boundaries between them

Should be different

These distinctions form

A tenuous relationship with the object

It is a ceremonial discourse

Of course

And it constructed a house out of shell