I.

Don’t believe a word they say.

The words of the world (which are the world)

Are not transparent.

Once, the birds sang less timidly

On the weekends, and

The cars roared down the street

More joyfully –

But all that,

And the small lunges of the clover,

How the gardener parked his mower

In the afternoon

To make the most of his small recollections,

How the climacteric bloomed into a heady flower,

Is overwith,

Anyway.

Now and then

Some pre-apple innocence

Astonishes someone,

Not like the summer sun

Refusing to leave,

But like the lightning of a gathering storm,

Severe and disproportionate reprisal

For things not yet haywire,

Someone sees the car coming down the street,

At first distant enough to be

Just somewhere,

But picking up speed running

straight at him,

Trashing future

And possibility until

The almost split-second of the

Truly real, staged and lit as if

the movie had rampaged berserk

off the screen and into the audience,

he narrowly escapes to the opposite curb.

Whew! That was close!

Let’s forget it.

When the words do come

They come like a cool stream,

And we crawl on the surface,

Natural swimmers we are,

While the depths’ repose,

When we let it be,

Holds us up intact.

When the poet’s face comes up

For breath, the chirring air will fill it

Like it fills itself.

Some never get tired.

But since even they must be aware

Despite the coolness

And indifference of the stream,

Most climb out.

Still dripping, they escort

Each other away from the banks

With waves and signs,

Their laughing voices fade

Into the chattering din,

One straggler always trotting

Up the path,

His hair disheveled

And shirt badly buttoned,

While behind him the words

Can’t break their unattaining rhythm,

And the crowd on the beach,

Who should know something about water,

Calls them tears.

II.

So where are the busy people?

“There is something in the prose, the abstraction I think,

That begins to make us feel uneasy – “

Characters loiter on the page —

Like a sparrow’s nervous throat

They waver visibly in the field,

A sly amusement seems to grip them

From the outside,

I feel it grip them

Like pieces

In an anxious collection.

Still,

Doesn’t it have to be abstract

If it’s to resist at all?

And if it’s not resistance

It disperses like the sand,

And the leaves,

And the mallards that just now flew off in fear

From the breathless landscape

I drew in a dream.

Resistance is the plot we share with gods,

The bone of contention.

For patience, too, of course, there are

Abstract precedents:

Half-moon in the nighttime sky,

Election Day,

Adonics, alcaics.

And while the world protects them,

They filter down to the rest of us –

The precise anthropological term

Escapes me,

But I have an intuition

Of how a house protects its dwellers,

And how a plot protects its readers,

From dispersion.

Outside, once again,

The true is always true:

In the grasses’ suspirations,

In their world-surpassing axes,

In the green they wear on their shanks

Like a flag.

Stupendous clouds

impede the sun,

monomaniac daubers

putter at the pane,

a Lazarus spider herks and jerks her way

through a wet thawed log.

Like Japanese beetles

In a storm-drenched rose,

We flick at the englobing drops.

We all survive so ungratefully,

We and those things, we stick in the gold dewdrop,

Quivering in its stupid splendor.

Let me try to be more precise.

In its unextraordinary cool,

The cool autumn on its way,

Gathering you back to your flickering self

Like leaves dried up in heaps of aspiration,

Brittle like the stars,

I wish I had fledged wings and shot away

When the ordinary light undid the meadow,

Even if the flight were fear.

I wish I had been spoken to.

I wish that I had seen what must be seen

Before it disappeared into its

Disgruntled articulation.