Here it is, the safe distance,
the utter wall, and in the center
the round idea of comfort abandoned
like a pillbox by the enemy,
apertures no longer bristling
with offense, but being suddenly
disarmed of menace, looking silly
as a toy mistaken in its use.
Prowling in the uniform
of an enemy turned friend,
I find myself lone marauder
of a landscape shrunk
to garden size by a future
suddenly arrived, — devised,
with time’s collusion, as heir
apparent to this patch of peace.
A century of weight is leaning
on the wall: a rowdy sky
disseminating cynical horizons
perpetrates a hoax of clouds
over the tongue-tied land,
and my garden waiting new
and barren as a billiard table
asks me how to grow.
Disarmed by freedom, I myself
become the arm of freedom,
pressure on a space to be,
filling earthworms with devout
commotion, penetrate the round-
house of idea to find seeds
in crude love-notes promising
lifetime harvests in a year.
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