Sand Theory: Poems

Cabbages Across from the Manitou Islands

41 Cabbages Across from the Manitou Islands The earth is the subconscious of the subconscious. —baChelard 1 Half a block inland and safe from genius gulls local and alone in their dishwater droves, up out of reach from beach inland-eaten by gutless waves, opposite the passage from two fresh green-furred ursine islands, one lighthouse-flicker lit, one not, safe from shark-toothed sails and trolling trolls, unseen by one old crow patrolling a fire-log-charcoal-pitted shore, innocent, green, unschooled, dim-witted, featureless, foregrounded by the imponderable plumpness of the crimson mother ships, summer’s end’s tomatoes, encephalitic, all intelligence, stupidly, yet astonishingly so, 42 2 formation in a deer-protected pen, each shaped of give and take, the tight-leafed both, oblivious to the bee, the gnat, the moth, earless, eyeless, tearless, softheaded clones, sunlit, windblasted, morning-tear-misted, unlobotomizable, sauerkraut helmets un-shovel-hacked, inmates of drizzle from glacial clouds, or funereally suited in fog shroud, unmonitored yet reconnoitered, so far inside themselves they don’t come back to the same seek and hide but leaf out lowly, frugally, loyally, reality’s verities: cloddish nobilities, 43 3 ordinary fames loudspeakered by this papery voice, admittedly: fondly, sanely and madly, with or without outlook, writing the dung book on life before utility, before soup, salt, spoon, giving their redolent all, outdazzled by streetlight, starlight, even matchstick, penned yet hardly bound, not yet lost not yet found, outwitted by worm and ant and mosquito, dawn, dusk, day, night, a dim, edible glow— ...