Robert Harlow

What Else It Brings

Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference:
it brings you to your senses.
--Charles Bernstein, “The Klupzy Girl”

Oh, that it should be so easy,
be so kind as do such a simple thing--
bring you to your senses. But the best kind
is the poetry that drops you to your knees,
spirals you off your feet, knocks you senseless
into a state of delirium, not just a simple swoon.
That’s for school girls believing somewhere
love songs are actually true, swooning
under a never-before-properly described moon.
Which should be like blood, lanterned
as a scowl of light, a distance
out of what it needs to turn inward,
if not away from its first-born hours,
opening morning, a blessing
of nearly incoherent words, marbles in the mouth,
sounds not understood until they are spit out
and the words form like the first struck bell,
its clarity so chilling it makes you pause,
wonder what it is you are hearing,
then simply become a never receding memory,
one that you have to tell everyone about
as soon as you stop swooning, that is,
not knowing you have been knocked senseless
in the best sort of way, not knowing
you will never recover, never walk
the same way again. So simple, so easy,
so like a poem, one that ends
before it begins telling lies
that make you swoon, then sway,
hoping words are more than enough
to tell you more than words can say.

 

Robert Harlow resides in upstate NY because he doesn't know any better. This is his second appearance in Misfit which pleases him immensely. His newest book of poems W/Reckless Love can be shoplifted from many fine bookstores. He is six foot two inches tall most of the time.