The Spectator

Should I here ... Knowing full well ... Whatever such phrase as this can mean .. Yet I contemplate That you may have no teeth for it This in me a sudden swell To tell and tell and tell Without the telling of a tell I can see you now Trying to see me More than I am I shall not let you crucify my mind Purging the bleat of the lamb Yet here I am Arranging sound upon a paper Writing a nut without the shell Making you think What is he doing today He is broken down His words scattered like stones From a former wall And perhaps mad as hell But to be polite Just say insanity is our knell I saw a poem today The yolk of the egg not gold at noon But white as nothing there This blazing incandescence of air And I did not write it Could not write what had no words in it Just images that could be tin foil Cut and shape a certain way But it was more than that For congruent cells were in it Bundled in the sensibility of my skin And beneath them, way beneath them The crows like a triumvirate of the sky Circled the expectancy of death Wating for either one The planes to invited to tragedy By the hubris of our genius Or myself, precarious on time Expired like a line The punctuation forgotten without meaning Where do we get all these words from In which we wrap memory Like things? All these distinct borders of things And their familiarity Shadows of time, perhaps When the planes are gone Just gone, where I do not know The buzzards remain Twisting from light to light Against the sky Strand by strand weaving me Upon their expectancy Such a poem has not tense No right Except me, willing things be so And yet none of us know If all of life is ever so Is ever so.