PDF

The Sentence as a Form of Crochet


by John Olson


What else can I do with this abstract ice, this jingle of bells, but be silent and enjoy it? A tall pink tower sparkles below these words. Whispers of cumbersome chronology help grease the gears of the elevator. I sometimes imagine the dead are trying to pull us into their realm. Could it be that Rome is even more wonderfully imperfect than at first imagined? I can feel something hopping around in my heart. Snakes and rapiers are more like axioms than gumdrops. But what is it that awakens the syllables of a warm farm crowded with shapes as the afternoon begins to lift itself into the air and a totem of vowels chatters its story of frogs and whales? Is it a big man doing delicate things, or a shiny Pythagorean pain? There is a meaning that seeps through these words and it would explain everything if I could only find it. I do know I prefer the sheets tucked in at the end of the bed but that doesn't help explain the powers that are invisible to us, the splashes of divinity sweeping over our oars. Form is the beginning of consciousness. Touch is optional. Gnawing is acoustical. Conquest is rudimentary. The vast unfolding of a consummate ache renders one's fingers more personal, more nimble of themselves as soon as one realizes that that inner pain, that inner hunger is riding a train through Texas. I'm totally into dumbbells. If my tongue is encumbered by a rabbit I accommodate its being and wrestle my incentives to the ground. I get up. I look around. And if the sun is still there I cheer the light and approve the playground slide. Raw essential being urges conference with a rhinoceros. I create holes in the air to escape from war. This causes art and stimulation. Darkness dangles like bats in a mouth of cabbage. I call this necromancy. But it doesn't work. No dead people appear. Just Bob Dylan on a horse. Tinfoil is emotional. I feel its attractions whenever I smell a catalogue rotting in somebody's garage. Maybe it's best to leave the dead alone. I'll be joining them one day, but for the meanwhile I'll continue my cartwheels and sexy indiscriminate perceptions of singing. I saw Finland once, in a dream, which is the true geographic location of Finland. I saw the face of its deliverance, and huge fuzzy eyebrows on the faces of the men, and women so flashy and beautiful that my eyes unraveled in gold. It's then that I realized that the universe is bigger than I initially thought and may be applied to the principles of the accordion, which goes in and out as one squeezes it, producing melodies and dilations of spirit. I can secrete anything I want. Ramification is something else. For that, we'll need an engine and a large comfortable armchair. It's time that we included our elbows in something. One can accomplish miracles in bas-relief. Opera stirs the senses. It's here that we begin to feel a heavy fire in the growling air and let the sidewalk do its thing, just lay itself out in all that concrete, allowing us to abandon our oars and luxuriate in the sweetness of incantation.

Endcap