Doug,
Your vision of fourteen reminded me of something I recently wrote. It's
part of a longer bilingual piece where each passage in one language -
English - is juxtaposed with a passage in the other - Norwegian - with
the same number of lines, stanza breaks, etc.. Here are two of the
linked passages which your poem brought to mind. (The first one's
originally the Norwegian; I'm lousy at translating my own stuff so bear
with me.)
I’m playing video games;
the screen flickers at a frequency
that makes the world flicker even more.
Countless frames with a void
wedged between each and every one,
flickering so fast
the rifts are only seen
through the corner of an eye, like now,
when the dog I never had is lying
in the easy chair and ceases to exist.
Drowns in this hole between frames.
Chomp. Gulp.
*
There was a flattening. Everything
slipped under the hooves, noiselessly
rendered into nothing other than what it was.
Skies into air. Seas into water. Suns
into combustion. Sound slipped to
waves, voices drained
to an acoustic blind spot. /Sluk/.
Zoom in tight and letters become
the voids between. /Gap/. All lan-
guage and just this single cavity,
this literal, this cardboard cut-out
stage.
--Knut
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