by committing all my suicides
on the typewriter.
A shot into the keyboard’s brain
equals
one
p
o + e
m
than a great machine —
a soap bubble
with corrugations —
not the interior of the soap bubble
but its surface
and the substance of the soap film —
empty space
wedded on to empty time.
*based on a passage from The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans
Letter to Jan Jacob Herman, editor of the little magazine The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE. Regrettably, he didn’t get around to publishing either poem. (But now Cold Turkey Press has, in a folio limited to 36 copies.)
(Poems © by Walter Lowenfels. Printed courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.)
