“Lyn Hejinian and sunsetting of intentional disjunction”

A poem in honor of Hejinian,  
Whose words, like minnow schools,  
Refuse the net, transparent skin  
Of syntax’s familiar rules—  

Lyn, in “My Life,” you built the house  
From splintered glass and memory’s rafter.  
Each line, a lopsided door to drowse  
Anew—syntax slipping after  

The sparrowed leaps of a thought awake,  
Paratactically streaming, refusing the yoke  
Of, “then,” “because,” of answers. You’d make  
Language a field with clover spoke:  

Hearts in blades, and reason tucked  
Where nevertheless—a pause. Disjunction  
Intentional, credible, lucked  
Upon. It browned with sunken function—  

Sunsetting now: I see in verse  
A late dusk’s soft coherencies—  
The ragged cut, almost a purse  
Of meaning stitched from what one sees,  

But oh, the light, the breaking sun,  
Where lines align, near-invisible thread  
You never would bind, but almost run  
Between bright images instead.  

O Lyn, if daylight finally bends  
To lamplight—syntax gentler, one—  
Still listen in the dark: your ends  
Were only the start of where the living’s begun.

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