Oily (Coleridge)

Flowering

FOR THE LEVELLERS

The May light makes
All things common, so
All beauty, resonance, integrity
Exist by a dumbfounded
Implacable levelling, a lingual
Mussing of high creep-
Speak with low paramecia’d
Saliences, pee-pockets of
Slangy impenetrables surrounded by
The rapt viscous peninsulas
Of straining motile desire,
A single cell becoming
Wholly mouth. Like language :
Unable to shut its
Trap, its gadabout patois
Enclosure-defiance, its impecunious
Free bunk. Dig it.

—

If one admits that one’s goofing off, pawing the backs of finely wrought (impenetrable) books of poetry, no chance of a “public coming to terms” with any of it—nabbing stray language-parries with impunity, on a kind of bender of oughts and noughts, snatching things recklessly:

Ten syllable Lines.—1. swift.     2. flaw.     3. drift.     4. law.     5. chime.     6. draw.     7. time.     8 clime.     8th. Alexandrine.

Thus Coleridge in October of 1804. Instructing himself. No evidence of the carrying out.

A flying cigar is the chimney swift:
A mash’d stump of Havana with the flaw
Of two jerky twittering wings: its drift
And glide’s against aerodynamic law.
That a common smoking implement’d chime
With a smoke-hole dwelling bird ought to draw
One to conclude that naming fits a time-
Scar’d kind of correspondence: man resembling ’s clime.

(Dogged hours of fitting the marquetry.) (Constraint become confinement.) (One supposes it possible to re-route the lingual neurons into a plush-geometry of tenners—that ’s the first heave.) (Continual mucking with the whole settlement of one’s musicking?) (What means “first heave compensating drawworks”?) (With oil topping $120 per barrel crude, is it high-scar’d time to learn its lingo?) (“Mud pump,” “hook load,” “rotary table,” “spiral-bevel ratio.”) (One skitters north through Michigan and sees lone pumps pocking the swampy center of the state: endlessly rocking.) (Large hens, pecking.) (Machinery’s inimical call—its leverage on the heartworks it mimicks.) (“The initial drilling is called ‘spudding in.’”) (“The oil cache.”) (“Oil spike,” “rig count,” “pipeline bombings.”)

Oil Pump