After nearly seven decades
I still own nothing
Am sure of nothing.
Some god has granted me
The grace of ignorance
To go with my compulsive curiosity.
That’s the hell of it, isn’t it?
An irony so relentless
As to be hilarious,
And we, laughing to split our sides,
Tumbling headlong into sweet oblivion,
Or not; no one living will ever know.
I think, I feel, therefore it seems
That the world turns only on
My constant spinning,
Only so far as my senses extend
My poor, mineral body, soft and pliable,
Prone to deflation;
That the universe exists solely
For my engagement, to be ingested
Piece by piece,
Or all a-gulp, wantonly;
That time is just the measure of
My preoccupation with one
Or another of my desires
Churned up in the small turmoil of being;
That all ends where I end,
And that all vastness is but an illusion
Of my impatient hunger,
That meaning stops here.
This, despite my earnest protests;
And all the infinite conscious beings
Of the infinite cosmos, too, protest
In vain.
1965, nickel bag, down from Chicago,
Alert, ready to flush at a moment’s notice,
When the truth was, we could have smoked it
In the front pew of the Church of Jesus Christ
The Bleeding Savior, for all anyone knew of it
Back then, back when everything dark was nameless.
And I was rambling aimlessly,
Words following words, broad and blunt,
The way a sailor rips his lines, the way
A soldier blindly fires.
And someone said,
“What’s he ranting about?”
And Hugh, my immortal vanished Hugh, said
“Dylan Thomas came down
And wrote a poem in his head.”
And, by God, he had.
We live so that graveyards
May be full of forgotten worries
We strive so that our hopes and fears
Will lie with us as our essence
Bleeds into the indifferent clay
The bits and pieces of our living
Drift out into the vagrant air
To be reborn in the yet unguessed
Strivings of the yet unknown
Leaving some vague imprint
On the great entropic vastness
A brace of haiku to weave into your dreams.
I.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
II.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
exiles child 