Ramble on, Tom. Diversity is good. The unexamined mindset is not worth keeping. That said, it's also somewhat reasonable to expect charged reactions from charged words.
Here's my favorite Donald Justice poem. I tried looking at the opening again through Tom-influenced eyes, and I found that the tritely-nostalgic incongruity of saying "There used to be" about a continuing natural phenomenon actually provides a good introduction to a poem in which images of eternity and continuity interplay with admissions of change and decay.
Although "the way the sunlight catches the cocoons of caterpillars" presumably remains the same year after year, the narrator's perception of it certainly "used to be" quite different, back in the days when he seemed to witness his grandfather's control over the coming of evening. Justice is looking back at a Golden Age and realizing that, yes, the paint was already flaking off the columns even then, and that the boy's body, too, not just his shadow, was slowly lengthening to a man's. Even the rhyme scheme starts shows signs of decay halfway through, though it returns to its inevitability along with the inevitable nightfall.
On the Porch
There used to be a way the sunlight caught
The cocoons of caterpillars in the pecans.
A boy's shadow would lengthen to a man's
Across the yard then, slowly. And if you thought
Some sleepy god had dreamed it all up--well,
There was my grandfather, Lincoln-tall and solemn,
Tapping his pipe out on a white-flaked column,
Carefully, carefully, as though it were his job.
(And we would watch the pipe-stars as they fell.)
As for the quiet, the same train always broke it.
Then the great silver watch rose from his pocket
For us to check the hour, the dark fob
Dangling the watch between us like a moon.
It would be evening soon then, very soon.
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