The Flea

At a certain point I stopped and asked what poems I could write, which were different from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they were impossible. What I could do was different from what I wanted. To see this was the beginning of work that could be work, not simply pursuit after pursuit that was bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got nothing so solid or continuous. The authority I wanted dissolved always into restlessness, into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate seemed like things that had come to settle inside a glove compartment. I had no faith in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith in the particular. There was the actual stone wall, its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading. The black speck of it, then the outsize sting. The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches. The flea that looks, through the magnifier, like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie, that can live for years in good conditions, and lives by drinking the blood of animals and birds, in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.