What more clouds are there to say
how it all matters to us? Buttons, strings, bits of fluff:
it’s all there, the vocabulary of displaced images,
so that if its message doesn’t add up to much, whose
fault is it? I can imagine casting the answer correctly
but it doesn’t work, there’s no question implied
in those gorgeous, plaited ravellings. Only a little
is known about them, and nothing about their hometowns,
backgrounds, etc. Really nothing more than a masterful
way of dealing with silence, of leaving it there, and then
being off on some expedition. So nothing
works. But there is nothing there that can harm us.
Don’t be afraid to let it hurt you, dance it
under morning’s wire, ponder anew the shuffle between the infinite
time bomb of the Nile and today’s shoelaces. Besides, these periods
have a way of elapsing, and the so-called healing process.
Does anybody care, anymore, where it went? Or whose sleep
it interrupted with a unique dissonance
of its own devising? They were always photographing
the cash register, some men came in and said it should be this way.
From now on you’re in the proverbial fix. Yet what was promised
was equal to what was subtracted, while periods of socializing
in the yard made up for how the money was spent. It wasn’t until
years later that someone got around to noticing the bald,
comic error that had been hidden there in the first place
to equate it with life’s beginning. By then it was in full sail,
swinging on the gate of how much longer we
have to lean out of the railroad car, swaying, singing.
The foul mouth should be caked with mud and weeds by now.
But we’re not going to let a little thing like that
spoil this birthday surprise, are we?
In addition to which the pole
still turns, in dreams, like the enormous wheel
of a rickshaw, viewed from up close, now
dipping into the mud and chaos, now rising like a sigh, a lark
on the mend, to remind us that all is well, or should be,
or will be shortly, given the interest in its shadow.
