Dining With DeLillo

a found poem from reading of DiLillo's Zero K"

He had a long face and large hands,

head narrowing toward the top,

hair cropped to the skull, sparse grey stubble.

I took another bite and tried

the taste with a name?

Carrots and onions, mutton and rice,

old and wrinkled.

Here the food did not look up when

I entered the meal.

The plate glass utensils

positioned diagonally across the table

were pajama sleeves, gold embellishments.

There was something I hadn't

until now, realized--

men are supposed to die first.

There are things in a marriage

it's tough figuring out--

four walls, the mindless hours,

time zones exaggerated breaths.

We sleep in the same bed, she and I,

enjoy a share of the blame maybe

figuring out an element of regret,

reminiscence over a disagreement--

that's all. Nothing more.

It's only natural, the parentheses

we've endured, the cracked clay

line of infinities. What the equation

meant to signify was evidence of

the ostensible convergence of

two distinct forces approaching a point

of intersection. Stalled plans soon to be

beyond the limits of harsh geography.

The merger of the limits of believability,

an end and a beginning--when

I would ask her name, create one

for her--to go home.

Ken e Bujold

2022

(found in pg. 39 100-01 254-55 of Don DeLillo's Zero K)

Author's Note

for those unfamiliar with the forum, or interested in how one goes about it...it's quite simply what it says, the reorganizing of a piece of writing you found into another wholly different forum, a poem. To my mind one of the best at it is Anne Dillard, the american novelist and poet

Reviews

[W. Barrett Munn]

This is an interesting concept of which I have heard but not tried to accomplish. You created a quite interesting poem my friend. Do you find benefit to this type mental exercise?

Winston

[Ken e Bujold]

i find great benefit to these types of poems, exercises. think of them as painting collages, scrambling words of a text, and keeping to a strict set of rules, can be intoxicating, as it reveals a great many bits that even the originating author probably hasn't considered. The one absolute rule I have is this every word in the found poem has to exist on the page(s) of discovery. if an "of, but etc" isn't there then too bad. I also like to stay away from the original theme of peice I am using. In this case was a novel of DiLillo, more typically is a non fiction source