Spring and All Aboard the Tit-Tanic

In the parking lot behind my lead-poisoned apartment sits a boat called the Tit-Tanic. I have no idea who this brave vessel belongs to, but one night Fletcher and I hatched a plan to take it all the way to Lake Titicaca. Provided the boat is still there on Oct. 31 (when my lease ends), we plan to sail by way of Brush Creek/Kansas River/The Ocean all the way to Titicaca, which at 12,536 feet is the highest elevated lake in the world. This is appropriate, seeing as how you'd have to be pretty high to even dream doing such a thing!

In honor of the lake and the mysterious flagship of 43rd Street, I give you Poem X of William Carlos Williams' "Spring and All." If the connections between modern poetry, Bolivia, and an abandoned motorboat seem tenuous, allow me to suggest that they are in fact, tenacious -- perhaps even titicaucus.

The Eyeglasses

The universality of things
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open

about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer's

shoulders and his daughter's
accidental skin, so sweet
with clover and the small

yellow cinquefoil in the
parched places. It is
this that engages the favorable

distortion of eyeglasses
that see everything and remain
related to mathematics--

in the most practical frame of
brown celluloid made to
represent tortoiseshell--

A letter from the man who
wants to start a new magazine
made of linen

and he owns a typewriter--
July 1, 1922
All this is for eyeglasses

to discover. But
they lie there with the gold
earpieces folded down

tranquilly Titicaca

WCW, 1923