“Poetics,” a Poem by Aaron Shurin
From the Collection “Elixir: New and Selected Poems”
“Poetics”
Was it the blue cloud of his mind? Was it the sun of her brain?
Here is the wind of their eyes. There is the rain of my hope. Is
it a language of sighs, a brawl of interjections, of grammatical
contraptions and syntactic obfuscations, there is the tiny planet
in transit from east to west, is it,? from left to right? There are the
ravens squawking in sidereal tempo, or a picture-book of samurai
erections, he shakes his head to parse the impressions of living
authoritative spark plugs and guarded nations, is it a language of
closure or rebirth, arbitrary sensations, or have they mastered the
form of incarnation: the dog with a human face or the girl with an
elephant trunk? The girl with an elephant trunk walks into a bar,
etc….Is it the shame of novelty or the rigor of attention, whose
hand, whose tooth, whose book, whose cloud whose sun whose
rain whose sighs…?
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From “Poetics,” a poem by Aaron Shurin. From the Collection Elixir: New and Selected Poems by Aaron Shurin, available from Nightboat Books.
Aaron Shurin
Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Elixir (Nightboat, 2025), The Blue Absolute, (Nightboat, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015). His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry to Italy’s Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation.
