Short Tales
May 10 2015


Why are tall tales
distinguished by height?
Is it the dark lengthening shadows they cast,
from slender strand
to monolith,
from outright lie
to clever omission?
The black gargantuan slab
just this side of tipping.

While the merely fantastic
exists in a gossamer light
of mischief, magic

sheer delight.
Learned by heart, and handed down
by word of mouth,
the patient art
of listening.

A poem
is a short tale
but no less intricate.
It doesn't lie
so much as hint at the truth,
or confuse you
with more than one.
And just as the sun's concentrated light
may leave you blind,

a poem penetrates.
Because a poem is like a prism,
splitting white
so you can see its difference.
And because truth is also plural,
in its subtle colours and shades,
coming in givens, and glimmers, and wished-fors.
So look a little behind, or off to one side
but never directly in.

With each re-telling
tall tales grow;
lies, inch-by-inch

until you find yourself imprisoned.
While short tales are honed,
pruned, reduced
encrypted.
Distilled
to a single truth,
the telling line

the clincher.

Or the falsehood
that just feels right,
and you cling to unremitting.


I think of self-serving lie-after-lie, falling like teetering dominos. I think of that black monolith that begins the film 2001, with its self-referential truth. Light is a bit of through-line, which begins with dark shadows, and finally reappears in the shades of truth and the metaphorical prism of poetry.

If tall tales are false, then poems are short tales that convey a different valence of true and false. Because ultimately, we read ourselves into it, and take away what we will.

This is a poem that begins in word play, which is always fun: the metaphorical "tall" of tall tales actually takes on height, while the shortness of poetry becomes less about literal shortness and more about truth. But it's also a poem about the insular and arcane world of writing: and I think it's hard to expect the average reader to be interested in writerly stuff. Too much "inside baseball", as they say. So if you're reading this, have you made it all the way through the poem? Or did you skip down to see what the hell I was on about?!!

I like the reference to the clincher, which is then immediately followed by one: all that stuff about precision and meaning in poetry when truth is relative and multiple, and then we end up making our own truth anyway. We love tall tales, and this love has nothing to do with objective truth -- even if there were such a thing.