Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire

Image thrown still. To resolution the collection itself will not resolve. The fractured image is by the nature of text juxtaposed with volume. Clarifies some distorting or losing fact
which previously had hold of come and go

while unknown are giving up only repetitions whose repetitions
one will want to mean, but often indicate stasis – not pattern 
signs of memories or discoveries faithful; but inevitably flawed
kind of interior analogue for vague specificity occurs through extended liminal experience that the invocation ghost might 
finally appropriate all of this under a kind of ethical mandate 
for get the story “right,” while some dependent on records
of “unreliable narrators” function under no such mandate.

Before actions abroad had few to no direct significant consequences at home. 11 September changed. Oppen 
declared, “There are situations which cannot be honorably met
by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment the house next door is burning.” And if the fire lasts a decade,
or three, or if the house is down, and only be returned to
in mind? And once exile has granted freedom to write
in opposition to interests of dominant classes, but has largely
taken your audience — then? Transcending arguments over
writing as politics as opposed to writing about politics.

Subverts narrative codes by obeying them only insofar as no coherent story may emerge, expressing right to not make sense. If narrative continuity is a logical, normative way of ordering chaotic flux of lived experience, what happens when continuity produces effect of disjunction, when logical pathways across time, space, and situation—which emerge through traceable transfers from one storytelling subject to another—do not eventuate in closure, let alone in cohesive allegorical potency?

As in “Reached a sweat,” moments upon arrival in ______ 
after slightly harrowing walk from subway. “Never seen
so many black people, moving so much tension noise I wasn’t
sure whether they celebrate a holiday or join street fight.” Ambivalence foreshadows both reverie and violence while

marking Manhattan, Dhaka, Rouen, Baghdad, Ansbach
thrilling and volatile environment, “so fluid and shifting,
that often within the mind real and unreal merge,
and marvelous beckons from behind same sordid reality
that denies its existence.” In the mind of the invisible,

this merger includes fusion of memory and experience,
recollection and lived reality: Heard of it, but this was real.
As struggled through lines of people new world of possibility suggested itself, like a small voice barely in the roar of city sounds.”

And while awareness of and empathy toward issues
that concern others is important; difficult to know: who might
also voice of when, how or why. What is the proximity
of experience, identity, &c. necessary for one to speak about
for another—in what context is representation permissible, effective? Of course, there is always firsthand, or what appears
to be, as in:

‘White woman across aisle eyed me entire
flight, gaze widened, neck craned as I (her eyes)
removed (her eyes) my shoes. What could say?
Sometimes I’m afraid I’m carrying a bomb, am
sleeper and don’t know when I’ll awaken. I should have
said: Identity isn’t an end—it’s a portal, a deportation
from the country of mirrors, an inflection within a
question, punctuation in the sentence of birth.’

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award.