"Rat in the Engine" is a favorite of mine, Leslie.
Here are two more Espaillat poems I admire enormously for their playful and probing metaphysics, for their understanding of the fickleness not only of ephemeral consciousness but of all articulation of dogma, if not of articulation itself.
Negations
Sermons the seasons preach that never quite,
and yet almost persuade, almost deceive--
migrations, the fidelity of light,
those steady habits--want you to believe;
as if the mockingbird set out to say
one thing, but changed its tune and took it back,
as if the wind crossing the pond half way
lifted its sequined veil to show the black,
as if your days were plates of summer fruit
that you may wash and quarter, core and pare
for guests, until you notice they've gone mute,
gone home for good, if they were ever there.
"Hard Sciences"
That's what we call them when we choose, instead,
Botany, soft as Easter after Lent,
which promises translation of our dead
into one green, perpetual testament;
Zoology, that clever joke on time
whose intricate, obsessive play on form
links past and future through the almost-rhyme
of flipper, fin, and finger, swim and swarm.
Those others measure scattered light not ours
to read our fortunes by; they will not bend
maternal over us like funeral flowers.
Those are hard sciences; they never mend
what living breaks. Except as headstones may,
by naming, standing up for what they say.
[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited November 07, 2008).]
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