What are the gods for a thrush? And what might happen to a thrush that it would renounce whoever these gods are? And is it all five gods? All twenty of them? And was it them being negligent or careless that opened the silence where the thrush could discover “small gems of truth”? All of these are questions I wish the poem would ask. But the pleasure of reading the poem is that it knows there isn’t a need to address a reader’s questions. This poem isn’t about me. It’s about a thrush. Who’s disillusioned? Who’s merely distracted? Who’s wanting more time to consider truth, or Truth?
I would say this poem (found in FENCE 40) is aware of the expectations someone might bring into reading any poem (“tell me a Truth,” for instance). This poem is more comfortable with keeping the reader uninformed. An attitude like this spurs the poem forward and carves out empty spaces the narrative can fill in. And, I would argue, it mimetically occupies how questions can lend a certain kind of centering. Because this thrush is too busy with not knowing, or the writer’s just trying to keep up with a crisis that even the writer, Pergentino José, isn’t going to characterize for me. What is meaning for a thrush that “has lost his song, his hopes, the movement of air…” Comments like these would seem to place the thrush in a hopeless position. Maybe it is. But the poem is about stripping the thrush of abstract and concrete sensation. “He has erased himself from fears, from light, from silences…” He has stepped away from his gods and by stepping away he is more something, then he’s more diminished away from everything. And that’s how he finds himself in a chapel.