Twenty-Seven Verses for Julianne Swartz

Mark Haunschild

                                                      The making, it is true, lets the jug come into its own. But

                                                      that which in the jug’s nature is its own is never brought

                                                      about by its making.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       — Martin Heidegger

                                                      Someone will remember us

                                                                                       I say

                                                                                             even in another time

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            — Sappho

1.

The table is a lesson in etiquette.

                       You have replaced me with the rock and wire —

tiny flags and hearts.

The mother, the child, the father —

                       blocks, with little machines inside.

The chair is a lesson in posture.

I appear as a substitution for air.

 

2.

What we know, when we first know it, is absurd.

You cannot help but feel that no one has ever said this before.

Art returns us to the simple grammar of things without words to describe them.

Without thinking, things are as they were.

 

3.

There are no true monologues.

 

 

 

 

4.

In the act of making, I cannot help but feel as if I don’t belong.

 

5.

Sappho still sings from what is left of what she sang.

No one remembers most of what Sappho sang.

Art is for the wind.

She sang, “lyre, lyre, lyre.”

 

6.

History is a long blue tube through which only a variation on a theme can be heard.

There is a world unlike the one you leave behind.

 

 

 

 

7.

By, “having been thought out,” we mean, “felt

                                                                               deeply.”

 

8.

The apple you eat and the apple I remember you eating.

Ideas persist in the aesthetics of a world without aesthetes.

 

9.

Most [… blank] fancies the world without [… blank].

[Blank] is what is left after we are [… blank].

I’ll take your word for it.

 

 

 

 

10.

The mind is the capacity for the unknowable.

[Blank] is what you cannot remember or forget.

 

11.

It is a thing, not that I know it.

 

12.

Because you did not ask, I gave no answer.

 

 

 

 

13.

[Blank …] […].

 

14.

What we’ve made exists despite our knowledge of making it.

 

15.

A human heart beats in the clockworks of a concrete block.

We only remember the world as we leave it.

 

 

 

 

16.

Mathematics and poetry will be attributed to the human heart’s desire to make sense.

 

17.

[Blank] and [… blank] are the true articles of faith.

The block is no less made than the stone.

You cannot say what you mean to a room full of ears.

 

18.

Atmosphere, to experience life by its sensations.

To be a vessel.

To look through an imperfect lens.

 

 

 

 

19.

Every thought is a stone at the bottom of a mountain.

We must imagine ourselves happy.

 

20.

I do not belong.

 

21.

Only sometimes do the fearful wish to be unafraid.

 

 

 

 

22.

The sentence carries the weight of all sentences written before it, should you wish to carry it.

The block tells the entire history of art, should you lift it.

This is not my first time either.

 

23.

I anticipate my words without readers.

I make a list of words and put them in a box to be opened after I am dead.

Only one of the words says “love,” the rest say “you.”

 

24.

Only the stone is irreducible.

If only we could run faster than our hearts.

 

 

 

 

25.

Everything imitates you.

 

26.

The greatest comfort is that we know next to nothing.

 

27.

Look how wonderful our ideas are without us.

A copy of a copy of a copy, and.

I follow your thoughts through the obstacles.

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