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cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod
stove-warmed flatiron slid under
the covers, mornings a damascene-
sealed bizarrerie of fernwork
decades ago now
waking in northwest London, tea
brought up steaming, a Peak Frean
biscuit alongside to be nibbled
as blue gas leaps up singing
decades ago now
damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung
habitat of bronchitis, of long
hot soaks in the bathtub, of nothing
quite drying out till next summer:
delicious to think of
hassocks pulled in close, toasting-
forks held to coal-glow, strong-minded
small boys and big eager sheepdogs
muscling in on bookish profundities
now quite forgotten
the farmhouse long sold, old friends
dead or lost track of, what's salvaged
is this vivid diminuendo, unfogged
by mere affect, the perishing residue
of pure sensation
a stone at dawn cold water in the basin these walls' rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet of the unnamed the faceless
Daily the cortege of crumpled defunct cars goes by by the lasagna- layered flatbed truckload: hardtop reverting to tar smudge, wax shine antiqued to crusted winepress smear, windshield battered to intact ice-tint, a rarity fresh from the Pleistocene. I like it; privately I find esthetic satisfaction in these ceremonial removals from the category of received ideas to regions where pigeons' svelte smoke-velvet limousines, taxiing in whirligigs, reclaim a parking lot, and the bag-laden hermit woman, disencumbered of a greater incubus, the crush of unexamined attitudes, stoutly follows her routine, mining the mountainsides of our daily refuse for artifacts: subversive re-establishing with each arcane trash-basket dig the pleasures of the ruined.
An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you're into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you'll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
that either
a First Cause said once, "Let there
be sundews," and there were, or they've
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.