Two more.
Another version of that lament for expertitis
was delivered by one Augustine Birrell,
who said: "how these authors magnify their office.
One dishonest plumber does more harm than 100 poetasters."
I love that.
Oh, this poem-- what should be the epigraph for this poem
would come from Jean Cocteau, who
said that children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which
the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Melted Money.
You know that stuff, that gelt you get at Christmas?
No, you don't get a gelt with Christmas.
That gelt you get at Hanukkah?
You leave it near the hearth.
It's not like grown ups' money.
It's really affected by weather.
It's great.
Something I like about it, a responsive money,
money with soul, melted money.
Time and time again, we told them not
to leave their stuff so near the stove,
but children have no past, they don't believe in futures.
Whiles and whiles of smoke unwind from houses,
causing more or less sky.
I can't tell.
I spent my life forgetting music's nature
is to pour right off the measured page, and intuition
floods the calendar, and animals go
stitching our enumerated yards together, world already
without end.
A little gold spills out from windows.
Everyone has spent too much on God's next birthday.
Thanks to the invisible, we are alive.
Take heat.
You can't directly see it, but it spins a shadow just as
clear as its subtended stove.
It is the meaning of the stove and moving off from it.
The children now are nowhere to be seen.
The children's pictures look undone.
The flesh-colored crayons are starting
to melt into the Earth-colored ones.