Classic Poem

I take heart, breaking in
to the drab little pueblo
of a dauber wasp: Inside,
wrinkled as a raisin
and rigid as Pharoah
embalmed and mummified,

the dauber's pupa-doll
sits in its shroud or pod —
a mere seed of a thing,
a bean, cold as the wall
it crooked against, and god-
forsaken now, though Spring

comes in a week ... And god-
forsaken anyway,
for all entomologies —
or maths, or rockets — could
coerce its crumb of clay
to a metamorphosis.

And yet — the first warm days
suffice. A shudder in
the faint magnetic field? —
and undifferentiate clay's
quick, visual, wearing thin
wings — and at last unsealed

it flies away. No wonder
Pharoah lay spiralled in
a caul of similar kind
when he went under ground. Or
that I take heart — who've been
bowed-down, and barren of mind.





By permission of the author.

I

But if Everything's moving, then
" fixity " doesn't exist. The room
in which we now lie
races through space; the moon's
orbit skids into in-
finity like a pitched horseshoe
and I who will love you
always won't always be I
nor you you ...

II

Let it move, then. Even so,
some Brake plainly held it back
long enough to produce Space-
and-Time and for these to fill
with all of Astronomy
and History, keeping track
of certain fidelities:
Launce and his dog; Orion and his;
the noon's and the night's face;
even thought itself, although
too often centrifugal,
condemned nonetheless
to continuity.