VINYL POETRY

Volume 9, November 2013

BIRDIE
Wendy Chin-TannerView Contributor’s Note

On Truth In a Nonmoral Sense

For Dad


In sociology, we say mapping,
we say cartography instead

of understanding. To profess
to understand, you see, is hubris.

I am a professional digger. I
should say excavation or archeology

instead of digging for the truth,
which is uncouth. Which is emotional.

And, again, hubris. We should never say
truth. What is the truth, anyway? Instead,

we should say subjectivity, as in: To what
are we subjected? Or: What is the subject

of the story of your life? To name it,
I say loss, I say yearn, I say tell me.

What else can I say? In fall, before
the surgery, we walked, the sky the color

of pigeons. I listened to you breathe, the soft
wheezing. I listened to the sound of your shoes

shuffling, crunching dead leaves into the ground.
I thought I would lose you. How could I betray

you by mapping these cities so far away:
Paris, Prague, Vienna, Kiev? How could

they hurt us? These faint cartographies
drawn in traces of my DNA, and names,

the names escaping me over time and sea
poetically in slant, half, off, and straight

rhymes. I could never escape you. Before
us, our name stands constant, and the City stands

constantly shifting, like truth. Like words and meaning,
making meaningless the crude facts of my making.





[Truth is] a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory (Frederich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).