I.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
II.
Time is not a river
It is an ocean of many currents
Give me a raft to sail on
III.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?
Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?
Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.
An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,
Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.
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.
I know something of making, and I’m here to tell you
If the world was made by some grand carpenter
Somewhere there’s a corner
To which all the error has been pushed
Some joint not quite square
Some depth not quite plumb
Some dark unknown fluke
Covered deftly with cosmic caulk
And one hell of a paint job
exiles child 