The Book of a Thousand Eyes [I love says the acrobat]
I love says the acrobat To read rarely passing Even torn scraps on the street without stopping To see what they have To say I'm late Or your car is Blocking my driveway If you don't move it NOW I'll call And have it towed, Jim I'm sorry, I didn't mean what I said, I just thought I did, we don't have, I need to get 1 lb ground beef, aluminum foil, briquettes And corn unless it's shriveled, call Turn left Under the olive trees where we used to weed And read Or think to read Since we must oversee our stories and not disparage those who tell those that begin What a genius! I am In my mother's room And end ringing out Ring out and ring The fuller reason in The kitchen where Mom is tossing The kids Are crossing And Dad is washing Westward, using his ears in place of his hands To raise the sails that move the canoe out Into the lake filling a pit made by a glacier That Time itself was riding so Slowly they say Sometimes at night the moon rose and attacked The very stones that the juggler cast over the hills and caught On a scrap Of music in a minor Key tenderly pressed and audible Still It sadly repeats badly repeats gladly Repeats Facts Falling like leaves Lost from a book about deciduous trees Whose black branches in winter cast grim shadows across the grand monument to history called Innocence Or Ignorance Perhaps—it's hard to say—the writing means nothing Now to William T. Love and he means nothing To me But I admit and affirm that he had experiences and thought about them Somehow holding his head Around his ideas with his ears as pictures Of the world held by the world Marking its course As something moving something To something which cannot be any more Infinite than all the sands that fall Through egg timers and hour glasses Shaped like pears, imperfect pearls Or globs of dew on the leaves of a weed That Pythagoras remembered As himself Becoming a bug, then frog, then someone Now who's Pythagoras Not me Say The equestrian in the park, the general in the jeep, the plumber under the sink, the actor In a longish play From which the thrill of political activism rings out Rapidly ripples Rotating clockwise for this is history And so are the stars at least For the astronomer and asters For the botanist are something humans have seen And savored and sown In spots destructively Devoured by the darlingest of goats On precipitous slopes For hire held By shocking fencing And fantasy shepherds So like absentee landlords we all but expect A probable leak from the slight smell of gas And the dirty glass of the jugs of the juggler
From The Book of a Thousand Eyes by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2012 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.