lo!

Some lines by Jonathan Kundra remind me of the Tony Towle piece I posted a couple days ago:

a man comes out of nowhere and causes great joy and sorrow. He becomes too big to behold. To be held.
In the end, he is all alone again.

The lines may be ending a poem called “California,” or they may be a separate untitled work. They are divided from “California” by a bullet in the middle of the page. I love the word play of “too big to behold. To be held.” The poet makes a tiny change in the physical nature of the words and a major change in the perspective. One is looking out on the godlike being – behold! – and the viewer recognizes that distance makes the being untouchable. Yet the man who came “out of nowhere” is a man, has human needs, needs to be held; his great feats have made him alone – and small, as one person alone, lonesome, is small.

source of poem: Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman