Today the morning paper’s nearly buried
under a whole dumped bagful of an “Extra” –
crisp, tan scrolls of the Sycamore Times,
whose headline is, as always, TIME TO GROW!
The grass, the weeds, the petunias, who believe
everything they read in the paper have shot up
an inch or more since yesterday. What goes up
must come down, I might have told them, but I
buried
the words behind a smile even I could believe.
These warm, late days, a mysterious extra
is in the air, and should the old ground grow
too cold too soon the last laugh may not be Time’s.
Reading the Want Ads first, how many times
have I made my way backward and ended up
with good news? Rarely. A sensible heart would
grow
tired of celebrating some item buried
once in a while in the middle, of finding the extra-
ordinary so easy to believe
that it pastes on the dummy front page of what I
believe
those trivial clippings that contradict the times.
A heart so unwearied, with very little extra
effort, could, it seems to me, dig up
the tons of newsprint that it has always buried,
dampen, compress, carve them until they grow
cold and hard as iceblocks. One could grow
inside such an igloo, grow cool enough to believe
oneself in the long twilight, forget the buried
sun, grow slow and padded with the blubber that
sometimes,
from under its calm white, the deep yields up,
live without color, an earlier world’s lost extra.
On a minimalist page every image is extra.
In an arctic age only the mind can grow
sharp enough to skin and bone and slice up
to dry the meager meat that one must believe.
In darkness no one can find and follow Time’s
footsteps to where the imagination is buried.
Or might one grow up enough to believe what’s there
in black and white, yet feel Time’s heavy steps
as extra, the heart’s path to a buried light?
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