I would have preferred to be excitedly
Narrating near-miraculous details of the day
I was rescued from myself and this world
By this world itself, but I settled for the usual
Quiet moment stolen by the lurking stream.
(I might have written purling for a bit
Of tongue-in-cheek allusion, but I made
A mistake and then decided I liked lurking
Better, as being more appropriate to both
The compositor of the words and the stream
That hugged the deepest canyon shadows.
Ah, a mistake. What a fantasy inherited
From my many thieving ancestors, whether
Of spiral-fractured bones or the wordy spirit.
We wanted to believe we made mistakes.
We wanted to be told we could make them
Because then the consequences would
Prove our decisions were of consequence
To our worlds, a necessary if not sufficient
Precondition for control. Otherwise, we just
Didn't matter, and it felt better to be guilty
Than impotent, utterly irrelevant even to us.)
When no one could be looking, I removed
My borrowed thoughts and phrases, out
Of my hand-me-down bone and leather purse,
And arranged them neatly in front of me,
Where I could count and reconsider them.
In the copse across from my rocky perch,
Cows chewed their cud and kept their wary,
Dark, wet eyes on me. They could look.
I wasn't afraid of further retheft from them,
But I kept a wary eye myself on the ravens.
What little, well-worn, thumbed-soft trinkets
Could I reassemble as if I had anything left
To barter with, being penniless and bereft
Of a persuasive sense of responsibility
To my extended human family? Awful man,
Always turning his blind eye inside, his good
Eye focused on his own navel or lap. Memory
Increasingly abandoning me, I sighed
And piled a cairn of the baubles I'd taken,
Me, bowerbird flirting with an angry God.
The stream, sounding anthropomorphically
Contented, sang to me. A cow lowed
At nothing in particular that either one of us
Could see. Instead of reordering any more
Of these dull ordinaries, these vacancies,
I began to doze over my remaining trove,
And the waves and the brain flowed together
To lull this infected mind, once full of chuff,
Now lowering, emptying, Borodin's Notturno
Winging the water-marked vault of skull.
No comments:
Post a Comment