Phenomenology

is the kind of word that vanishes
from my mind as soon as I look it up.

I Google Michel Leiris. No faster way
to forget a man. I try to follow

the tenuous thread of the sentence.
Sentience must be a similarly delicate

string, airborne maple seed.
The first time I caught snow

on my tongue and tilted my head back
to watch white whirl from the dark

I thought, whose globe am I in?
The flight only visible in street lamps’ lobes

of light. Any flake I touched was gone.
Any flake the world touched was gone,

whirl stilled, seconds pooled
to leave nothing but the sound

gone, and the word. My mind left
with only a gallery of words.

_________________

The italicized text quotes Gaston Bachelard’s introduction to “Poetics of Space,” p.11-12. 

The introduction references J.B. Pontalis’ “Michel Leiris ou la psychanalyse interminable,” 

which describes Leiris as a “lonely prospector in the galleries of words.”