Crystal Anderson
The Convergence of the Sacramento and the American Rivers by Frank Dixon Graham |
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To Matt, Whom I’ve Never Met and Do Not Know
“But generally speaking, it is always more difficult to write four sentences in one, for example, than one in one, as in philosophy.”* by Crystal Anderson Say I press my face against a blue whale. No need for sculling beside it. Mass can ride the underbelly. Say we we’re diatoms and turn our world to a sulfur color while riding our whale. We’ve managed to miss the dicrotic of the whale, of the water, anything as long as we don’t float away. Euphausiids are going to get caught. It’s inevitable. Their transparency Keeps no secrets and while they filter, They give themselves up, Swarms of honesty inhaled. They don’t come out alive or The same. Ever. This whale is not the most gargantuan, but it is pretty blue. Still, this one will be the only giant some know. The only whale you and I know, my diatom neighbor. As this mass in aqua dives, moves purposefully, those alive and attached naturally go along. The whale’s belly doesn’t get bigger, it just seems that way when you’re less tiddly and realize that people walking down streets in all this yellowness see you. There are moments where we can’t even hide behind fluorescent screens. When song seems to escape our whale through its holes and plates we, too, make dialogue with meaning that continues beyond the finish of interaction. Perhaps the inverse Apex of the dive “is the depth of darkness Not wanting to be said.”* *From “Sartre at Seventy: An Interview,” August 7, 1975 To Matt: Not Everything Can Be Said by Crystal Anderson I carried an opaque whale into your study. It was a magical puzzle of sorts, cooking off materialism, snapping its moorings. It was a sack of imagery on my back. I tried to speak in Sartre from behind the whale. I offered up nothing. Experience has changed my language into a rubik’s cube. What good does transparency do at 26? Let’s be like Frank*. I won’t speak of jumping Chinamen or pretend I’m a boat in danger of sinking. We both know the earth is full of people and not one of us has started the Transparent Revolution. If we did, we would remember to use our blinkers, would trust the news and the critical element of our dialogue would last after our fingers stopped typing, after our mouths quit just saying, and listening carefully became habitual. I don’t leave my apartment unless I have to. $550 a month, the shower is standing room only, the ceiling leaks and 20 feet from my back door run the tracks. It is safe. On February 16, 2008, I got my oil changed and my blood jammed hard through my system. I sat in the Jiffy Lube waiting room not reading Camus. The book was open and 3 other people also waited. Every Tuesday and Thursday, 22 college kids look at me as if I need to say something clever. One of them majors in astrophysics. He does not speak often, but he writes in concrete language and sonnets about things that are not science. I tell them Ginsberg is overdone and tell them Joy Harjo’s lilacs and cocaine are the center of her Santa Fe. I do not count how many times I crash over my tongue. The you I know lives 8 hours in front of me, says he gets to stand in front of Jesus, will look out of a window at least twice in one day and mouth pleasantries out of necessity. But the you I don’t know is my impenetrable whale and neither of us live in a see-through society. I can hardly blame you. There is still swimming in a glass of vodka, a burning sort of transparency, and I wonder if you are less of a casanova than the you I know. But not everything can be said and not everything wants to be said. Most days you will see and read people that you can’t speak frankly with or at all. Your surface is a narrative, but we will have to work to understand the you that is free verse. *Frank O’Hara Both poems were previously published on Pulverized Diamonds. 
Crystal Anderson is a writer and educator. She holds a BA in English/Professional Writing from Baylor University and an MA in English/Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of California at Davis. She currently teaches writing at The University of Phoenix. Her poetry has been published in The Rattlesnake Review and The Suisun Valley Review. |
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