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# Two Poems by Ted Dodson
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/two-poems-by-ted-dodson/
- Published: 2019-01-03T12:00:48.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:40:03.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected two poems by Ted Dodson for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:34 (2019, 2020, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/11/hilma-af-klint-groupi-primordial-chaos.jpg)

Hilma af Klint, “Group I, Primordial Chaos, No. 16 (Grupp 1, Urkaos, nr 16), from The WU/Rose Series (Serie WU/Rosen)” (1906–1907), oil on canvas, 53 x 37 cm, The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm (photo by Albin Dahlström, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm)

## \[BROOKLYN 5/25/18\]

It would be too easy to say that love vanished from the earth, to say  
an emptied mountain struck its hollowest note and sounded  
unlike anything else. I text the same three people every day, sometimes  
four. How fast that dream left me when I woke out of it, snorted up  
into a catalog of faces pinioned with long and draping hair. Unrecognizably,  
I am thinking of something else. Not a dream or a short, transparent reality  
like the outer bend of my eyes or a limping thought poking around the calendar  
for an approximate location. Something else. And I really don’t feel I know enough  
to say what it is. Shouldn’t a work of sufficient emotion optimize any morning  
into a cascade of murmuring strings that appear to fix the ground  
to an object vast enough to be in the continual distance? I knocked on that door  
once, and I think beyond it was all spaghetti. Life’s things do pile up like that,  
though I’m daily assured that I can be driven into a normative clarity,  
wiping away thoughts like they’d accumulated on a windshield.

Andrew sent me a new story of his yesterday about an empty-handed search  
for a fabled painting of Guibert, whose only evidence of existence was its appearance  
in *L’Homme au chapeau rouge*, which I have not read. Andrew later emailed me  
to clarify the search is fictional and the narrative cribbed from *L’Homme*.  
The story is beautiful — one of my favorites of his, now. The image of never having  
been though still having, distinct and existent as anything else, a life  
hangs clear and unguarded and doubles as a volume of forgetting one  
pages through while sitting up from bed or even walking to the kitchen  
maybe for coffee if I remembered to buy a bag of beans at the store yesterday.

## 

## \[WASHINGTON 10/3/18\]

At the center of what lives and dreams  
an unmistakable and debtless intelligence  
or a cataclysm of unmanaged resources  
that could buy time as if it were being sold  
like a PowerBar or blank note pad: an unfinished  
categorizing of OTC suggestions could work  
my heart blue then yellow sky  
over the long drool of attractions their  
copious marginalia. Feel and swelling  
under the surface like music fills a balloon.

There were two of us then there were several  
invented by way of an elementary connection  
that spans a small room provided for too many  
to wait in. To get back to basics would mean  
valuing ourselves last or breaking a halo of reason.  
That much was ever certain but hardly assured.

\* \* \*

Ted Dodson is the author of *At The National Monument / Always Today* (Pioneer Works, 2016). He is a contributing editor for *BOMB* and an editor of Futurepoem.

*Readers are encouraged to submit 3–5 poems as a PDF to Wendy Xu for consideration at* [*poetry@hyperallergic.com.*](mailto:poetry@hyperallergic.com)