The Fertile Desert

A poet being interviewed asks,

Or are poems a sort of resistance:

The art of resisting pain? And this feels,

Like so many lofty-ish statements,

Both true and profound on the one hand

And a rotten, prosthetic falsehood

On the other. It’s not hard to see

Pain as something poetry resists,

But what activity, during pain,

Isn’t conducted as resistance?

There are many arts resisting pain,

And poetry one of the weakest.

Yes, poems are a sort of resistance,

But only in that almost all acts

Are a form of resistance. To live

Could be defined as to carry on

An indefinite series of acts

Of resistance, and resistance ends

Only in being, which no longer

Resists. But returning to the art

Of poetry as resisting pain,

We may be faced with something subtler,

Poetry as an activity,

One of many, none wholly unique,

Diverting, channeling, using pain,

Pain that compromises resistance,

To instead support the resistance,

The lines of language dug like the lines

Of irrigation in the desert

To prove how fecund is resistance.