Of Its Occasion
Oh, what do you think? Fewer peacocks
in the pine woods. The tableau of moonrise
over yon foggy hills so picturesque
it might best befit a canvass. I mean
what is the difference between what is
and what can be seen—as if description
is the only thing that lingers, an aftertaste
of sight? A rich chewiness, like raisins
for the imagination? The raison
d’être. An idea that outlasts at least
a summer’s day? The hero acts for us,
our representative from Connecticut.
(Imagine this in tercets.) But then
he speaks, and we can’t stand his voice.
You understand what I mean. I mean,
isn’t that what the rain says? Or perhaps,
because it doesn’t rain these summer months
it doesn’t matter because you can imagine water
falling on the sidewalk, you’ve seen it. But
now the houses are made of sun, and the
hours slope steeply toward what blisters the eye.
You can’t look directly at it. It is
humorless, nonetheless the wind chuckles
in the branches of the jacaranda,
and flies light on the pyracantha in
the actual heat. (I used to think pyro-
cantha—fire in a can. Was that wrong?)
So these are merely words you know
their power to control the way the world
seems. But that’s just artifice. What to do
if something serious happens, like a
glacier melting? What language do they speak
in Greenland? Much less what to do when the bank
breaks, this civilization would become
more relaxed, everyone in blue jeans
growing food in the backyard. Unspeakable
the names of the starving, the dead honored
for not living. Instead, we pretend these
transparencies of sound, a flowering
of sirens and orange cones on the thruway.
The signs that mark evacuation routes.
I suppose the mind’s correspondence is
exquisite, the origin of the tongue.
Yet its commodious polyphony sucks
the dry warmth out of eucalyptus leaves
whose fragrance is a memory of dappled
shade, of a maze of backyard gullies,
fences melted into a reverberation
of curves. The underlying ground giving
way to dust. Why should anyone remember
this? The past as big as space, the blue that fell
from the abstract sky. Was it naked then,
some forged truth charting the weeds, the lemons
more yellow than a spectrum of adjectives?
In such phrases we found our daily bread.
