Five or Six Perfections

 

20 June 2022

Each of us has only five or six ideas. My perfection is time. The present is a glowing drop I keep sliding from. I try to read the forest floor as if it were an alphabet consisting of frying pans.

 

Each of us has only five or six ideas. Throw them in a field like bones and see what creatures come to smell them as they rot. The boneyard is not idea, but burial site. Perfection of place.

Each of us has only five or six ideas. They wiggle like a magician’s plates, defying physics until he sweeps across the stage. Today, mine hide from me, like my dog beneath a blanket. Five or six times she howled in her sleep.

Each of us has only five or six ideas. Either we husband them or we do not. Either we’re frugal or profligate. Our early work might have been enough. But in this lateness, light.

Each of us has only five or six ideas. He begins every poem with the weather. The weather is bad today, so wait five or six more. Take notes on each day’s conditions, as they shift. The weather is visible idea, unless it’s just the weather.

Each of us has only five or six ideas. We breathe them in and out, out and in, wondering at repetition as a state of being, then being again. You cannot breathe the past, one says, though I filter it through this tense, counting toward the future past.