Ultra Orator Spell

I become the song I’ve been
singing alone in this field with you.
What deal did we make that leaps
so far behind both into the horizon 
and from it? Some grim comfort
has come my way in the form
of an ox. The ox struggles to remain
in my consciousness, an unfounded
howl yearning to ring around
a ventriloquist’s echo. I’ve become
too busy for such nonsense, so I cast
it into the places where I retreat myself,
the ecstatic, gratitudinal rest and re-
storation of popular music. My goal
isn’t to unfold popular music once
more, rather it is to speak now to
how the animals say it better. Make
the nominal joy render justice. Make
a joke of nothing. Grade this remark
holding no reluctance today, only hope.

Copyright © 2021 by Soham Patel. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 9, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“‘Ultra Orator Spell’ began as an N+7 procedure. The source text was a much better poem from Prageeta Sharma’s book, The Opening Question. I used an old dictionary, one that’s falling apart and has pages missing, one that one of my favorite uncles used when he was learning how to read, write, and speak English. The word grim in this poem was grief in Sharma’s, so while revising I chose to add the word comfort for her right after. Like with most all of my aleatory exercises, the result ended up being at once a kind of ars poetica and something about love.”
—Soham Patel