June 16th, 2009
Tiffany Beechy
ON THE POVERTY OF MY IMAGINATION
The problem is, nothing happens in the world. There is
distance: vast stretches, wide dun-colored vistas, jungles,
lava flows, river deltas, ice fields. But I can walk out my
door and run, literally run into the utterly fixed and frozen.
I feel confident these dummies multiply ad infinitum, filling
space. The doorman to my apartment—his eyes never
leave me. I whack him with the same phrase day after
day. He never changes his uniform. His smile is the same.
My mother never changes her position on the couch, never
cleans her braces. Dad never talks. I have no siblings.
It is not that there is nowhere to get to. I could fly far
away, in fact I have been all over. The farthest
was Prague. People were just standing around.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
The problem is, so much happens in this world
people are dreaming thinking scheming on 88 levels
of every Manhattan highrise; the psychic energy
enough to power a train barrelling through rodeo lands
tumbling weeds and chevys and little Lakota girls’ braids,
steaming down to the teeming sea with depths deeper
than Everest’s heights and more kinds of fish unknown than known.
Every day a miracle; every day a new element
to the periodic table, a new strawberry plucked by calloused hands,
a new concatenation of cells bursting forth into family
and new paths weaving an ever higher threadcount in life’s tapestry.
Every day the microchip gets smaller, wikipedia larger, the possibilities
ever more endless. So much to see, so much to do, so much
to know. So much to sing. So much.