Static apnea (breathless stillness)
is the art of floating
face down in water. From a practitioner,
an intimate tally of minutes.
Minute four the hardest,
characterised by the throat's spasms,
the diaphragm's kick. By six,
these have subsided
as when, sitting zazen at a copper wall
the mind at last
stops its restless grasp for words.
You think these aren't comparable?
The body wants breath.
Breath wants speech.
We know this
from the first blow.
No one teaches it.
The mind calls itself
bull-headed. Calls itself mythic.
By this it means
pig-headed. Means
lost. The mind reads semantic
aphasia and sees a sheen of oil
in a rain-black parking lot --
this accidental beauty,
this gloss of the words
across the surface of the world.
________
So, ya wanna be a poet? Help me decide if that last comma helps the slowness you want in the ending, or if it simply brings the poem to a crashing halt, or at least a bumping one, and how a different line break (say accidental / beauty) would change this flow. Be sure to spend a few hours at this decision, and to change your mind several times. Let me know how it turns out, would you? What a silly way to spend time.
Read about aphasia -- not the only interest I have in the origin of language, but one of them. (On that note, read "Early Symptoms.")
The title is wordplay, of course.
I think the comma works. I went back and forth on this for a while, but in the end I think that it works. The repetition of 'calls' and 'means' at the beginning of the last stanza slows things down considerably, and there isn't time for the reader to really pick up enough speed to really trip over the comma. Compare it to a speedbump in a parking lot where you are already going slow.
Aphasia interests me greatly, as does synesthesia. Replacement, reordering, the crossover of categories. I wish I could see music.
The comma doesn't make a difference to my reading one way or the other. I think that a helpful slowing change comes by changing the ending of the 2nd to last line, across/the surface....
Of course, I'm not a poet, and never claimed to be. But I did think on this for you, for a good 10 minutes, which is all you can expect of this accelerated student.