of a toddler, overheard
after being put to bed
repeating to himself
a word he'd learned that day
and that's become for me
the prototype of our relationship
with 'reality'
(Nabokov agrees
it should normally be written
in quotes)
sometimes, too,
in the small-font comment-line
under a blog headline
i'll channel Zippy
and repeat a weird phrase three times
just to help it sink in
and this 'sinking in'
feels to me like it involves
the solar plexus
feel it in your belly
which makes the best sense to me
in the light of Kleist's observation
that graceful action
must flow from our centers of gravity
so in our flattened neural maps
the point(s) that represent the solar plexus
may have a special status
addressed by the toddler-Zippy within us
when a pattern is considered 'real'
so that it will in future
shape our grace
at the deepest level
acetylene and hydrogen cyanide
acetylene and hydrogen cyanide
acetylene and hydrogen cyanide
