IDEA

Half-complete before you realized your hands were moving. If only you'd finished it that way! But now you hold it to the light, narrow your eyes, the mind's oily brass pistons begin to fire ... a Reichstag visible only through special goggles. Grab your jacket, you're off to the patent office again. The boy with the piccolo stumbles in as you rush out; you tip your hat and nod. While you draft blueprints all afternoon, he'll wobble around your yard in his uniform of whiskey, playing aimlessly, leading his cheering roach and rat disciples up and down the half-finished spaceship's steps.

Aren't they beautifully mysterious when they're first born? Two parts shimmer, one part meat. More in the body than the mind. But as soon as you try to move 'em from connotation to denotation (slipping the net beneath the fish), you see how dull they really are. This is the problem that plagues Guido Anselmi, the film director in Fellini's "8 1/2". He has lots of exciting ideas, but once they materialize they bore him. The poem steals its ending from the film. Sort of.