Music for when the music is over
Is what a poem is. There’s no music
In a poem, just the imaginary
Composer breathing beneath the deep wreck,
The curves of that glorious alphabet
Resilient as bioluminescence
Stuck in the seafloor. There’s something in it,
How poems pretend to sing. Like a peacock
Pretends in the wide span of its plumage
That there is no end to it: the far stars
Of galaxies and its ocelli gaze,
Gazed and gazing as one, the first fissions
Finally arriving to the listener,
Who makes sense of it sooner or later.
Stuck in the seafloor. There’s something in it,
How poems pretend to sing. Like a peacock
Pretends in the wide span of its plumage
That there is no end to it: the far stars
Of galaxies and its ocelli gaze,
Gazed and gazing as one, the first fissions
Finally arriving to the listener,
Who makes sense of it sooner or later.
— Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “The Peacock,” Paris Review (no. 223, Winter 2017)
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