What intense colloquy with the self
will furnish-may be nothing. A
yawn is the reward. This clock,
dull in the room. Confrontation
with a beloved human being is
a superior achievement, is human, is
impossibly difficult. We buy anger
in this time, once in a great while,
a thought is thought. Clear and round,
oranges ripen on a little tree,
across the room, pure in their
orange, the implication of flavor
is intense. The smell of the
blossoms, on occasion, stirs some
fictive and banal nostalgia.
I sit, in my inviolate and
manufactured arrogance, my pen
moves familiarly, the clock,
the night, this light on light
blue lines, the white,
white paper filling with these
words—all at one with
the identical nostalgia, we
are all products of,
“our time”—we call it,
“our” time, as if we ever had
the smallest hold on it.
This disparaging voice—all a
colloquy between two invented
modes, this lonesome mood
which one clings to as a balm,
all some imbecile gesturing at
dignity, and a final barrier to love.
On the margins of various papers
he draws circles, and lines. They are
suns and moons, what else
could they be? The suns are larger,
their yellow-white light, their
heat, implied by rays
circling their circumference. The
moons are small,
the lonely man in them
realized by careful shading. Outside
it is fast darkening, but these
papers are filled with light!
The suns blaze and rage
in their endless explosions, the moons
are pale and paper-white: all
are absolutely still.
Their systems fully include him, include
as he creates them. What
blistered orb or dead rock
out in space have never meant
to him but in terms
of his own smallness, these
do. These do, he stares through
eleven inches of this mundane gas
at something real. They are
brilliant. They are beautiful,
and absolute: for certain, absolute.
The weight of the rock
on the heart, the earthy
grossness of it, a smell of
turf up, up from one’s
depths—the odor of graves.
The hopes that flash in its
surface, dazzling veins
one knows are fool’s gold.
No storekeeper, brittle
with greed, will accept it
each bemused face will marvel
that one’s heart keeps pounding.
A heavy heart gives proof
that one lives—let those I despise
float off, their brains grey balloons.
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