look like? Would it have long lines and profundity
breathing as if through veins of green chloroplast
seething rapidly through its metaphors and stances
and prances and stanzas? Would it come in blocks,
almost justified in its self-justifications? Would it
be full of answers or dull with questions masquerading
as answers? Without the masks, would the exclamations
come across as pauses in a thought-stream that cannot
stop apologizing for itself, feeling so sorry for itself
that an ending comes across as an option demanded
furtively, assertively? Long questions become bed-
ridden with their fates. An opus would require
magnanimity and grace, wit and a fence of
place. An opus would command and contravene,
rebel and build and scratch. An opus would
contain prepositions of great calibers, firing
nearness at aboutness, fearful with aboves
and bellowing. There would be no parallel
structure in any given opus. The opus is
wired in serial. The opus is a series of
gestures which happen to be taken as
seriously as they are furious. The opus'
potential to be as spurious as the edge
that the razor aims to trim, the hedge
that the cup of opus aims to brim with
all the water the bushes could drink --
those rows of teetotalers. An opus is
an art of judgment, set upon the
rails to rail against the training
that the set tables in the opus'
day.
Roman Ryan 