54: OF VAIN SUBTLETIES
There's a school where I live.
It’s unused or misused and maybe by me, overrun.
The vain part that goes there
To smoke and to see, what is happy or sad, perhaps peace
In the playground considering how a metal slide might
Or a swing set, and Bermuda grass.
The last time, a year ago, or a few months ago
I was happy and vague, the terrible
Place that will change, approximate to the wish
And quiet before.
Where a person might sit on a bench and look out, remember
It’s not like youth, though I want to be things
Creeping alive, and the perimeter
Alive, and the foxtail to stomp through, one must be happy
In content, to have lived
In a city
Its archive, not one or the other
“A marvelous testimony of weakness, our judgment.”
It’s a middle condition
The thought of what means
“An abecedarian ignorance, before knowledge”
And behind it, the loose field.
Or equally troubling, where one walks
Not in love or a lover’s old war
But through variety
A big blue and faint red, like “the nickname of ‘The Trembler’”
Might also recommend us
“To endure human accidents.”
There is a little impression I can understand
As monkey bars or utmost
Fear, and coming after experience
“In the middle range”
With an extensive depression, like looking.
Even to walk back, turning in
Is going towards it, the doctrinaire passions
Stupid or royal to keep on
Regarding achievement, I’ve always
Used them,
“Between two, without honor and value”
And noticed how formal my composition is.
The snappy velvet of weed, my backpack, and
Mind, though
Right here the flattened down daisy
Takes over, or woodchip, a serious explanation
Whether it’s being pretty
OK in the lens,
As the spaces above and below pleasure, in retrospect
Filled an impossible certainty, so the dead
End, “our inventiveness warmed up,”
Stops at the fence, to begin.
Where one travels the passage, begins
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56: OF PRAYERS
Pebbles made of sea-light, fossils, error
Inscrutable, like a cottage
And getting lost inside, or just one gorgeous shrub, pulled up
Its texture somehow careful, then wet—
Time is over, or I’m not in it anymore
I bear it, in the mouth
The delicate temerity with which each leaf
Thunders its data, “both crime and judge,”
Like God is lucid and perched
In one’s central notions, how can the force
Be lucid and I want it
“This vain and verbal knowledge,” in my hour
“What prodigy of a conscience can be at rest”
In trespass, and diversion, indulging those multiple secrets
The hourglass flipping
Five years on the screen, I could say
God, and Recognition,
“Felt even at their confines” as incentive, not zeal
Yet the backyard, and burn pit,
Is garden, refuse, myself
Setting tables with china, and silver
But no food on it
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