consider sidereal earlier lines left in
times gone by, while we converse
with a while ago
and
wonder if
we agree that we need be a we?
Are we a we by cause or be cause we are?
Thought words, mere never spoken syllables
A rogue hobo daren't test me now,
I'd clean its muddy plow.
Set me steady, I'll be the ox pretending he
is Socrates, and he has all the ready answers,
this is what a wise man would say,
if ever asked,
What would I live for. Life I'd say,
if I were that lizard who stopped
just within my per-ifery,
caught my eye, sat awhile, and scooted on
across the rock my house that
I did not
build,
was built on. Big, old, bare-faced granite,
passed over daily by ants and spiders and
squirrels and chipmunks, and more
than four non-inter-breedable
kinds of lizards,
all live right,
outside my window, in the world that was
before I was, therefore, before
we could be
-- letting go my care that no one has ever gone
where I hope to go.
I do not know where I hope to go, but this
is where I hoped to be.
I hoped to have the leisure to lie about and be
the happy grandfather,
for no more than a week at a time, charged
with keeping the wee ones growing
beyond the apron strings or Dad's
dangerous tools, ask first to use.
Then for months, to be alone, among my books,
listening to accredited lovers of wisdom,
mix it up with lovers of oil and fire and light, to see by.
Rodney King's famous, to me, plea:
Can't we just get along?
Define my terms, cries my bored director, Who are we?
A Sunday afternoon in October, alone, but for that lizard.
