Spring Drawing 2.
A man says "lilacs against white houses, two sparrows,
one streaked"--
I'm going to start over.
Get your attention again.
This comes back to this thing.
Spring Drawing 2.
A man says "lilacs against white houses, two sparrows,
one streaked, in a thinning birch,"
and can't find his way to a sentence.
In order to be respectable, Thorstein Veblen
said, desperate in Palo Alto, a thing must be wasteful,
that is, a selective adaptation of forms
to the end of conspicuous waste.
So we try to throw nothing away, as Keith, making dinner for us
as his grandmother had done in Jamaica, left nothing.
The kitchen was as clean at the end as when he started.
Even the shrimp shells and carrot fronds
were part of the process.
And he said when we tried to admire him,
listen I should send you into the chicken yard
to look for a rusty nail to add to the soup for iron.
The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire,
but he saw that it led to fulfillment and then to desire.
So that one was easy.
Because I have pruned it badly in successive years,
the climbing rose is set out among the pale pink floribunda,
a few wild white roses from the rootstalk.
Suppose before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass,
each poet had to agree to be responsible for the innocence
of all the suffering on Earth.
Because they learned in arithmetic
during the long school days that if there was anything
left over, you had to carry it.
The wild rose looks weightless.
The floribunda are heavy with the richness and sadness
of Europe as they imitate the dying, petal by petal,
of the people who bred them.
You hear pain singing in the nerves of things.
It is not a song.
A gazelle's head turned.
Three jaguars are eating his entrails and he is watching.