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from The Fatalist: The best words get said frequently‚ they are like fertile pips.

By Lyn Hejinian b. 1941 Lyn Hejinian

The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips.

Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent

abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love

releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life

to think about. Take R—the only thing

R could credit herself with was having lived

her life and so she not only kept an account of it

but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters

—abundant, profligate, indiscrete—that I want to write

to you so as to note something that I read

this morning: “It’s not that this or that means something

to me but this!—or that!—means something to me.” Musically

R bequeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might

bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain

past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us along

to the time when those who come after us will learn

what we know—a man with a mustache waxed and dyed

green, a line of tall people and a woman at the door, a committee

of children without scooters but not mournful, a poet with a motive, a pilot

with a flashlight, a sulking but fascinated scholar, and Goethe no doubt

for whom R would have released a flock of red canaries.

Lyn Hejinian, “The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips.” from The Fatalist. Copyright © 2003 by Lyn Hejinian. Reprinted with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing, www.omnidawn.com.

Source: The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003)

Biography

A founding figure of the Language writing movement of the 1970s, and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics, Lyn Hejinian’s poetry is characterized by an unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday. Like most Language writing, her work enacts a poetics that is theoretically sophisticated. While Language writing is stylistically diverse and, as a movement, difficult to reduce . . .

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