“old magazines piled up against the hours” -Ben Mazer
To put all poems of note in one,
Sacrificial cries watched by Italians,
Exemplifying hills and small lakes,
Cold, held by higher mountains,
Landscapes bitten off by words
Put into little leather books by spies,
All the Germans who translated things
That stood missing a long time in the earth,
Statues discovered only yesterday,
Yet suspected to be Michelangelo’s;
Records indicate he lived nearby,
The rebellious villages giving alms
Where the best of them were found.
Even the English springs, not Victorian,
Edwardian, leftover scents underground
Where even bright petticoats could find them,
Gave us the greatest challenge, poems
Cooked in spice, eastern vegetables
Chopped, and baked in the ovens
Where I saw down into the hole, black
Not moving, something tiny,
Maybe just a sound that modifies
Living with itself, stands under grass,
Heaves large rocks for hours;
Some of us working, seeing in haze
And further murkiness just before
Five o’ clock, the hour we love,
The hour uniting us, in a definite distance
That puts us in the way of so many poems.
Jolly as a thief, covered, at all points,
The instructions vary, half-understood
By the drinking mind that knows us,
Pulp in the garden, the small things fidget,
O twice-painted Keatsian bicycle,
Described, once again, those tools for you,
Placated nicely, soothed in all the paths
Going to you and letting you know
That here in the limestone hills
Where gods develop, you can still,
In the hush of extraordinary vision,
See things grow, peeping, the smaller,
The better, as the trained discover what
They are good at, at last; but pursue,
Instead, something else, to earn a living,
What no one was good at, what sent
The guards down, always indifferent,
Breeding Shakespeare, keeping the whole thing
For later, for the better yesterday,
Because you, jammed up against the wall,
Thought to turn your head slightly,
Habituated or not, towards sunrise,
You, finally in the poem. You can stand here.
Go ahead, I’m waiting.