Response to Galway Kinnels Poem "The Middle of the Way"

The sonic universe is moving but the heart doesn’t beat. It is atemporal, corporeal, a pump of presence that captures poetry in its stillness. It is the between of the intertwined and the chiasm. It is the ontogenesis; the opening and closing of the flesh that never reaches space, but comes as a flow of silence in which vein like fingers touch at meaning. It is empty and full in an eternal paradox of extremes but its blood-effect will forever spread, in this subtle interconnectedness of our senses and our sense of the world. It is the moment where space envelopes and time is broken open. It is where the wild dark of sense and the heliotrope of language hesitate to touch.

Signs are subjectification and objectification. They come as heavy sound, the drawing back of arteries, ricocheting off the heart’s still beat, pulling it from metaphor to sign and back into the temporal, the epistemological dimension. Words control the beatlessness of the heart – to make it jump away over some invisibility of the mind-body system, to try to abandon the heart’s stillness, to make it move outside its paradoxical and concrete inertia. Words saturate into the flesh of the heart its ontological signification; the self. It is here where metaphor drops out of the storm and ceases to be rain becoming a droplet that forms a puddle that finds its way into a larger body of water or evaporates back into the clouds up and away from perception.