From Honey to Ashes
What follows is terms and classifications, the West Of speech congratulating itself within A system so complex there's no way not to be Effective. Just as they had planned the streets On either side are lined with all that's needed, Storefronts whose glass returns a look Filled with the contents it displays (Mannequins, organics, mobile phones) Making even moving sitting still, an embrace Above anything that's so. Cuts and clouds Drift south across the far part of the sky From adventure to instruction, so where There is only the mildest threat of showers You see a shape and then a story, parody Of the private life of the world. And what was promised to the mind of the hearer In transformation remains away, ideal Portrait there is a certain pleasure in reading As buffer against what today sends tomorrow. It's like forgetting that part of childhood In which one learned to do everything From the pages of a book not unlike A painting, but a painting with motion In its idle depths, down where dusk meets Foreclosure and the clouds charge out Into the gift of seeing them forthrightly Pass by a thing that might have happened, public Pleasures that progress, the horizon, etc. Always more or less just starting out Its day, though it would be better to call it A grouping sent down through suffering To sunset, signed in the same place by night To win over the jury in advance; it's a painting Of the burning of a book whose content is Colors, lights, flowers, fragments of bone Taken from the wound, from greater and lesser Distances, to tell the bad from the good, Buy the evening's groceries in every sense. What follows is seven dominated days Of the week ready to bind with really anything At all, your thoughts as you come forward Out of the haze like sun through a curtain Or go to sleep so as to be of further use— You would like to choose between them But aren't these one and the same task?
Credit
Copyright © 2012 by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Used with permission of the author.
Date Published
02/03/2012