Look at Quintillions Ripen’d & Look at Quintillions Green

Look at Quintillions Ripen’d & Look at Quintillions Green

Look at Quintillions Ripen’d & Look at Quintillions Green

How impossible to have a reasonable relation
with the self no matter what you say, Walt Whitman.
You don’t seem all that reasonable either,
half libidinous ether, half dirt full of soldiers’ blood,
half lilac branch. Three halves?
Precisely my point. Self, one moment
you’re a mountain with no roads or roadsigns,
your thoughts higher than air
so all the climbers can do is stare
and shield their eyes from your glacier glare
then kerplunk, you’re demoted,
flunked, a sticky splot on a table.
The waitress comes over
with her table-wiping rag
of such rude condition it’s hard to imagine
anything it wipes is ever better off.
Sorry, she doesn’t apologize but doesn’t not either,
an irony perfected by working beneath yourself
like tightrope walkers mending nets.
But she too is part of particle physics,
too complicated for most of us to fathom,
here one moment, there the next
without it seems any intermediate fix
like the self’s mood swings, all over- or under-
whelmed, never just plain whelmed.
Not that I’m asking for some steady boring state
of never going up and never sliding down.
If we admit that constant orgasm
ain’t gonna happen in our current contraption
there’s bound to be some down time,
refractory torpors reading a back issue
of Sporting Life in the waiting room
while the drops dilate your eyes
and the words about fly tying blur
then are consumed with light too bright to see by.
The mind is a tiny island you’ve washed up on.
You wanted to win the million dollars.
You wanted to be the teacher of futuristic poetries
not the structure of the argument.
In your future is a long journey.
A mansion with many bathrooms.
Something dark on the moors.
Spangle.