Two Poems

John Chorazy

Adoration of the Argot

The way language functions
          under the microscope
                     (disregard prescriptive grammar worlds)
"every place is its own language" (Sontag)
syntactic code, when necessary shift
of purpose in the explicit sense

"Only I love her
I only love her
I love only her
I love her only"

Start then with a simple topic
          a headline
          my life (and yours) in sixteen words
          or less, as it were, or just
the story before the caption . . .
          What does anyone know of these things?
          Who would?
make it up if necessary
          scene by scene in frames

You could do this all yourself
(avoid the past tense)
or find it in a picture
keeping eyes always on active verbs

"Played
was playing
have played with
had been playing"

in Plato's cave?
("really the prisoner is speaking of the shadow")
Nothing passive about that

Choices made to convey meaning
          bully the conversation
Perhaps
the way language functions
functions language that way

***

Braids of Influence
(Riff on a Haibun)

Rising from the lake again this morning a fine fog lifted like the arms of ghosts, broke the tree line, bathed the almost empty road with fluid whiteness. My mind works this way too— thoughts pulled up from depths unknown float gently skyward.

Three swans, elegant
in silence, drift on water—
ripples stretch behind.

And now I know I don't know where it is that we return to, the open place, the womb of feathers welcoming the final breath, the place beneath the iceberg pulsing warm with vacancy. From the road the sign is evident to every weary driver—home. Why we'd go this far without goodbye I'll never know. We could have had at least another word before turning off the light.

John Chorazy, editor of The Ever Dancing Muse from 1993 to 2003, has facilitated writing workshops as a teaching artist for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts' Artists in Education program through the New Jersey Writers' Project, Arts Horizons, VSA of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Music Society's Literacy Through Jazz Program. His poems have appeared widely in journals, and his Poems For Lunch, an assortment of short works, was published in 1997 by Who Who Who Publishing. His collection Walking Through My Father's Garden won the William Paterson University English Department Chapbook Competition and was published in 2006.

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