all my poems are unique general principles

~for Helene Mendelsohn~

“A general principle never comes to life in my mind except by exhibiting itself in various special forms and in
crowds of instances for each form":  
R.G. Collingwood

each a construct - an arch-i-texture,
each a crowd of a single instance
special forum, a dialogue differentiation,
a conjugate particle,
forming up, in marching order,
a singular troop, a base case singular,
a soldier especially demanding,
“Of Me, Write, Write”

for within my insight,
a one-off sighting,
one glinting wave reflecting,
its one millisecond exactitude of existence,
reforming unseemly, a new but not!

a seemingly similar shifted shape,
but no wave is a precision repetition,
perhaps a passing familiarity
of its precedents, antecedents,
at best

an instance borrowed and paid back
to the generosity of time
for a fully developed statement of a
general principle,
even a primary secondary textual emendation,
requires a unique naming definition

being born and dead dying while you are blinking,
does not understate absolute value,
a principle exists to give absolution,
so the moments resets,
perpetually,
but its own resolution is n’err forgotten

do you see the crowd of inferences
herein contained?

the principal unique,
poem plucked from passing sun ray,
a tickling hair of a brazen breeze,
one wave, one wave reconstituting a
millennium of preceding lives,
deriving its abbreviated genealogy
of droplets of prior principles
forever reinterpreted

so I gave you back
words you knew
but in a new combination
establishing this poem,
its constituents,
as a unique general principle

there is a prior poem, new, unique
in everything