Seventeenth Series of the Static Logical Genesis

The order of illusion scintillates the sky with stars seen from afar. The mellifluous breeze detained my attention. A broken oar from a boat belonging to one who speaks without words discarded by the shore.

“‘You like poetry?’ ‘Ye-es, pretty well—some poetry,’ Alice said doubtfully.” And who could blame her for equivocating, given what she had been and would be offered: words begging not to rhyme, vowels wishing to be left alone, entire stanzas ready to revolt against any ordered deployment of sound.

In his new book, autobiography swallows itself from the waist up. This can cause lesions to appear, which must be why they lopped the top of his head off on the dust jacket photo. Some have never healed. “A delicate purple, violet or lilac color.” I want the stolen line here.

She claimed to be going off to invigilate an exam for a friend, but I sensed duplicity in the air. My cat’s capable of that, which means he’s more human than a few of my students. Or so he leads me to believe. How could I know for sure?

And you, with your avant-garder-than-thou smirk concealing a smile, just dying to intone “Individuals are infinite analytic propositions.” Perhaps, but we on the inside prove the exception to your rule.

—Paul Naylor

Paul Naylor is author of Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History and two chapbooks of poems, Book of Changes and Arranging Nature.

Originally published in the December 2003/January 2004 issue of Boston Review