In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

Stung

S T U N G A child I became a question sitting on the grass. To be told how lucky I am. An open field. This corporeal expanse was a body too in silver magnetism. If I became this light it wasn’t luck. It was easy. Bells falling away along the divide of night. Along the divide of night an old face. A sorry dormer leaning in askew below the incoming thunder. This was true and even if ever I ran away. I ran away. Above everything I held one true thing. This scene moved through me, 131 a seesaw. A picture inside a question inside the coming night. These trees rang round my head, shored up the sky. I went on and on like a trial balloon over the houses. Over the roofs. Over my head. ★ To remember correctly the color of pale grass in March, its salt hay blonde flourish. To see it as it was, faded cloth, mute trumpet, the seam inside a day the sun climbs. Simple the life of the mind standing outside in the grass in March. Outside memory. Spring interrupts one cardinal monody transmuted by a signal red 132 developed against a draining blue horizon. To want to go there and to have been there and to be there now. This walking right now by a river, simple and not so clear when transcribing this unstable multiplying narrative spring. It can’t be called anything. We too are sprung and wound with evolution, I want to say. That’s it: love. Not spring. I have felt it also in quilted drowning snow under the sheets in a clanking house. Clank, I love you. Clank. Not spring. Glossy grass wigging in a brightening sky. The thrill of hair standing on my limbs. ★ 133 To be and not to understand. To understand nothing and be content to watch light against leaf-shadowed ground. To accept the ground. To go to it as a question. To open up the day inside the day, a bubble holding air bending the vista to it. To be inside this thing, outside in the grass place, out in the day inside another thing. 134 ...