George Quasha
Request Response
from Preverbs of Tell
tel-let online
2002
Request Response
Copyright © 2002, George Quasha
tel-let online
325 W. Tyler, Apt. B.
Charleston IL 61920-1865
USA
Request Response
Let the stones act on you.
Objects in free space are separated by their music.
One knows them only in the place of one, plural, the singular they.
Sex hides identity in the double fold.
Connection carves a grammar of their own.
Here we are at the threshold of cutting oneself off along the line.
Steady as she bounds.
There’s a meaning between assertions the poem can hardly escape.
The line rides a wish but has none of its own.
Hearing sounds.
Language flags, the poem comes up from behind.
The young woman’s mode of surviving early abuse sounded like hyper-irony.
Caused a flap but the feathers settled and everyone sat down to read.
These particular words fidgeted before surrendering to the eye.
They rushed back to their stones.
Things do so to speak.
She knew they were hyper and could barely help themselves.
Random access reversibility as optimal eros.
Diagnosis is knowing itself between.
What lies under the flap?
The knowing that stands apart from me.
The stone’s invitation was something you just felt or didn’t.
Circumincision, the telltale grammatical rollover, divine fig lust in drag.
What if the head is only the title of the body?
Slam it in reverse.
Back into the present.
Precarious balance is the prayer of the edge.
Under the foreskin the eye divines.
This is a true story.
Do you trust a medium in which "This is a lie" is selectively paradoxical?
Are you yourself a trusting medium? she said to my face.
Careful, sequentiality is not for everyone, let’s face it.
Have you been tested? Your point?
Truth or Consequences, site specificity, habitat of certain people.
Certainty is not contradictory to the precarious—a boulder on the edge.
Do not think of wild stones.
How one sits the instant before a landslide.
The point of freedom, revealed, alas.
Access to the beyond. Wavecrest as infinite ledge. Dialognosis.
Strictly speaking the between is not self-limiting.
A moment in every day that Satan cannot find.
Each one has a radically particular free point.
The voice of your conscience or the woman behind the stone?
There is not much danger of a counterfeit free point.
The interesting "sense of freedom" tends to evoke lyricism.
No slamming up against a boundary unless the song goes long.
The singing voice of light volume and modest range easily knows its place.
Lyric avoidance by contrast presses its nose against the pane.
Revised request: Think only of wild stones.
Voice of the poem, voice of your teacher, your lover’s voice, earth angel ….
Lyre of stone.
A breath is a singularity.
Declaring poetic vocation responds to a call to put it all on the line.
There stones lie where people lie, words in their sounds lie, lyres lie
aligned. This lies that paradox lie, once and for all time.
Otherwise the line is wide open.
Death is a singular rime. Like birth like earth. The big wake.
Like being given birth to into death—self-opening caesura.
Mind the gap, lest you entrain bodily.
A natural breath dies—at the limen of the pulse.
Present bardo, all this training, back & forth, back & forth.
Ahhh, fresh air.
Like stones attract in the sense, likeness in being itself is open.
Art gives me bright ideas at the end of the tunnel.
Light to read by as a lode in a line lies beyond the sense of ending.
Always already knows.