The Music of What Happens

The Music of What Happens

It is to this all art aspires,
They say,
When those twin helices, the double gyres
Of form and content turn as one instead,
Until whatever sense they may
Be said to have, though sensed, cannot be said.

And isn’t that what happens here
From day
To day, this fashioning they engineer
Of time through time: the way the air arranges
The sky or makes the treetops sway,
Or washing wrestles with its shadow changes;

A thermal rises from the plain;
A wave
Crawls emptily and lets the sea remain;
An intricately moulded sheet of water,
Flung from a plastic pail to lave
The pavement by a neighbour’s squealing daughter,

Casts a transparent, dimpled, belled,
Ruched, laced
And pleated arc, which almost seems upheld
Against its own liquidity and weight,
Then breaks, its shattered wetness traced
Like shadows, though they soon evaporate.

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