You could call this rare bird a freak
Of nature and you wouldn’t be far wrong
For art and nature link like the fission of gametes
As the urn began as marble in the ground
To be conceived in artistry
Only to be lost like a foster child
In undiscovered archeology
And at last cherished like a bride
As a museum piece
So poetry accordingly originates in nature
Its marble the stuff of language
That freakish endowment of homo sapiens
Shaped and sculpted into
What
Perhaps a framework
For the contemplation of the mind
A poor formulation due to pesky of
Something contemplates mind
Or mind contemplates something else
Or mind contemplates itself
Or mind contemplates intransitively
So we emend vigorously to say
For contemplation by the mind
An attempt poorer still
Redundant pleonastic tautological superfluous
For what else contemplates
The liver
The chair
Polyfluoroalkyl substances
But here a glimmer of hope
Somebody contemplates and why say mind
And indeed contemplates something
And perhaps poetry supplies this object
As a box score or Wikipedia
Or ordinary perception might
For language refers
To furniture and bodies and such
But often to griffins and space invaders
And airy abstractions’ metaphysical ontology
But if so what could distinguish poetry
From these mundanities
And here again the glum allure of definition
Nailing How to the cross of What
Gradgrind demanding the definition of horse
And every word but names a category
Claim implicitly the definitionists
And what unique homologies
Establish the clade of poems
And what is this
The twelfth century and we nominalists
There are things to which words refer
This is a hand sorry about the shadow

Yes of course a picture of a hand
And not of a pipe
The picture refers visually to my real hand
I can invent captions that would push
The image or image + caption
In the direction of poetry
I could say this is a paw
Or a mitt or a paddle or a fan pusher or pipe
I could even say this is not a hand
Each of these entries sidelining
To some extent referentiality
Even as they depend upon it
So far from abolishing referentiality
They veer away from it
No that’s too strong
They slant into the territory
Of those features of language
That need not advance
Its referential function the stuff like sound
Rhythm rhyme patterns of vowels and consonants
And images and figures of speech
Figures syntactical or tropical
In short the armamentarium of verbal artistry
Most especially those features that conduce to tone
That seduce to emotional attitude
And more especially still
That notorious tone namely irony
That deliberately distorts value
Hence Dickinson’s Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Season the truth with sufficient irony
To make it perceptible
As Lightning to the Children eased
And Dickinson exaggerates splendidly
For what person or what poem
Can tell all the truth
But beauty is its own truth
And there’s more to art than beauty
There’s the sublime and the ridiculous
Tragedy and comedy
Passion and tranquility
And poetry delights in maneuvering proportion
What I callously call distortion
Lilliput and Brobdingnag
Freed from what it has to say
As Mallarmé would have it
In another fine hyperbole
For only rarely would a poem
Cede entirely the referential capacity
But rarely is not never
Witness Melnick’s akcorn woi cirtus loqvump
But even here reference hovers dimly
In the arboreal resonances of akcorn and cirtus
The dimness of the pinnacle in the intense inane
Make it madness
Make it new
Make it dirty
A road trip into fastidious squalor
Thus might I quote in its entirely
As an autobiographical fragment
The 1964 telephone directory
For Jacksonville Florida
Put a boot on a pedestal
Nail banana to museum wall
Adopt a nasal intonation to recite
The instructions for getting the wifi going
Or better cast a boot in bronze
Silkscreen a banana to adorn a record album
Arrange sentences that aptly refer
To my happy childhood tinged with anxiety
My equivocal age shaded with regret