The Other Happy Thing

Desmond Kon

“Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.”
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

There are no limits to freedom,
another faraway poet said.

How free the conceit,
flight of an extended movement of images
turned meaning
on the high note of memory.

Memory again, like ephemera
like this book’s lines
as marginalia.

How tightly situated into my poetic imagination really.

My—written up—
as owned,
beyond even the assumed speaker.

The wide-armed love
of such work
working in and through the stark,
the distinctive, of one metaphor tumbling
after another, complicating
further, farther
the associative threads and combinations
through associative threads and combinations.

All these other images and metaphors,
more of the same, likeness,
even the sheer look-alike.

My work has become more of the same.

A mere intellectual exercise.

The faraway poet is standing on an embankment.

All the Metaphysical Poets,
the handful of them,
and all the ones who came after,
are facing the poet.

They stand on their own earthwork,
each levee its own thoroughfare
like a resplendent ray, like emanation.

Safely anchored, set in stone.

His posture is a readied nod to the old,
that Derridean notion of aporia.

I used to like that effect,
thought it freeing

in its beauty.

Its stasis.

Of meaning,
and meaningfulness.

I liked it, as a kind of impasse within my verse.

I, appearing here again, as apparent and situated.
My, appearing here again, as steady.

Aporia, to what breakwater did that fly away to?

How death comes to us
after all the years,
that old, tired habit
of the almost impenetrable.

Desmond Kon
Poet & Writer

DESMOND Francis Xavier KON Zhicheng-Mingdé is the author of an epistolary novel, a quasi-memoir, two lyric essay monographs, four hybrid works, nine poetry collections, and a creative guided journal. The former journalist has edited over twenty-five books and co-produced three audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Among other accolades, he is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, Singapore Literature Prize, National Indie Excellence Book Award, Poetry World Cup, two Independent Publisher Book Awards, two Illumination Christian Book Awards, and five Living Now Book Awards. Desmond teaches creative writing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He can be found at: desmondkon.com

Photography by Shana Van Roosbroek