The Wrong Kind of Insurance

        I teach in a high school
	And see the nurses in some of the hospitals,
	And if all teachers are like that
	Maybe I can give you a buzz some day,
	Maybe we can get together for lunch or coffee or something.
	 
        The white marble statues in the auditorium
	Are colder to the touch than the rain that falls
	Past the post-office inscription about rain or snow
	Or gloom of night.  I think
	About what these archaic meanings mean,
	That unfurl like a rope ladder down through history,
	To fall at our feet like crocuses.
	 
        All of our lives is a rebus
	Of little wooden animals painted shy,
	Terrific colors, magnificent and horrible,
	Close together.  The message is learned
	The way light at the edge of a beach in autumn is learned.
	The seasons are superimposed.
	In New York we have winter in August
	As they do in Argentina and Australia.
	Spring is leafy and cold, autumn pale and dry.
	And changes build up
	Forever, like birds released into the light
	Of an august sky, falling away forever
	To define the handful of things we know for sure,
	Followed by musical evenings.
	 
        Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes
	Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery,
	And the funny thing is it knows we know
	About it and still wants us to go on believing
	In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants
	To be loved not for that but for itself:
	The murky atmosphere of a park, tattered
	Foliage, wise old treetrunks, rainbow tissue-paper wadded
	Clouds down near where the perspective
	Intersects the sunset, so we may know
	We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many different things,
	Too many to make sense to anybody.
	We straggle on as quotients, hard-to-combine
	Ingredients, and what continues
	Does so with our participation and consent.
	 
        Try milk of tears, but it is not the same.
	The dandelions will have to know why, and your comic
	Dirge routine will be lost on the unfolding sheaves
	Of the wind, a lucky one, though it will carry you
	Too far, to some manageable, cold, open
	Shore of sorrows you expected to reach,
	Then leave behind.
	                     Thus, friend, this distilled,
	Dispersed musk of moving around, the product
	Of leaf after transparent leaf, of too many
	Comings and goings, visitors at all hours.
	                                           Each night
	Is trifoliate, strange to the touch.