The French Revolution by Michael David Madonick
Associate poetry editor Rebecca Pelky on today’s bonus poem: I’m not going to tell you about this poem. I’m not going to dissect it to perfect breaks of lines or twist it into long spirals of metaphor. I’m not going to think it to pieces so small it defies meaning. Because this poem begs me not to, and it’s built with such care that I don’t want disappoint it. It argues with grace to be saved from solutions. Instead, we’ll let the iridescence be a reflection of nothing but color and light. We’ll navigate sound as a bat might, sending it out, waiting for its return as itself. It’s true, there are no maps in this, no net, but the water is soft in the darkness, and will catch us yet.
The French Revolution
Sometimes things are just themselves, an event
of language pursuing itself the way the hound
lost in peppergrass engages a circle, a sphere, the hot
scent of the absent. Still, one needs such excursions,
the slow boat across the pond, the ponderous
regiment of oars, turtles inherently tumbling
from their perch. One needs the incantations
of the itinerant, the offerings a moment brings, as if
they were dragonflies delighted with their own
iridescence. Expectations, conclusions, the dead-aim
explications of the world hold no water. For Christ’s sake,
the darkness wants us to be calm, to take to it the way a bat
might, faithfully coursing the unilluminated regions of its
particular suspiciousness. I must say, I am a bit tired of
answers, of the hard drawn proof of the map, the
weatherman predicting what cannot be hammered down or
the theorist always bringing me back to something
that settles him, makes him safe, but rarely
sound.
Michael David Madonick is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois where he has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years. He has been published in Boulevard, the New England Review, The Florida Review, the Northwest Review, the New Ohio Review, and many others. His first book, Waking the Deaf Dog, was published by Avocet Press in New York, 2000. His most recent book, Bulrushes, was published by The Backwaters Press in Omaha, Nebraska, 2013.
