Indulgence or mercy. And why not both?
A daytime caress to steal a carbon blemish
as if the nubile hour when light lay down
were to come back fleet and quick,
no net or pitchfork to round the stillness.
Remind us how it works,
this matter of Janus looking back.
As out a window overlooking a
fox-run valley, a fairy’s chromatic worth of
silver to ribbon out a river.
Patriarch to an outlaw clan,
stargazing in a gutter’s hideaway,
evasion’s ragdoll insignia never as modish
as that ancient ‘now’. ‘The Elysee carries a name on
and the bus behind me gives me a date for peg’ (E.P. Canto VII)
No one returned with a tale of
elephants, yet they mammothed
a year-long dream, and when at last
the circus crashed against summer’s
coast, all was as imagined.