I met with the class today, and I told them that every once
in a great while I fall into something that I
think of as wandering rhyme.
This is one of those poems, and it's quite new.
And I may not know how to read it yet, so I'll just try.
"Milk."
From time to time the placid shrugs its shoulders,
earthquakes for instance.
But still the world depends on placid things, resistance.
The fire requires its trees, the sea its hem of boulders.
The wind without its holes would howl in silence.
For everything that flares up, something
lowers itself, digs in for an existence in the long haul,
slows.
It may well be the placid knows its worth.
The cow whose calf was taken eats again,
but do not guess too quickly at the meaning in the red hips'
unbent squareness, the large-jawed head
half buried in the grass.
With each fly's weightless bite, the thick skin shivers.
The placid, unlike us, lives in the moment.
Something must-- like chairs or painted dressers
on an Earth where loss is so all present that we drink it
without thinking, blue white in its early morning glass.