Stupidity’s no grounds for our despair.
It drives or drowses everywhere—
waxen, bristling, pitted, slick—
as variously textured as
notoriously tough. It ought
arouse more wonder than aversion:
cases most complex are hexed, and know it,
while the simplest merely grin into the void.
A sort of wisdom, either way, this
being short on wit.
Nor may despair accrue
to humankind’s unsightliness—the humped one no one loves,
the scrawny and the scrofulous, the pimpled and the pocked—
who hasn’t lost all sight of beauty,
once the beauty talked?
I can’t lose hope over the way
we tort as we retort, reveal as we redress—
I can’t regret the spank of life, its sparkling
more-or-less. Where heartlands lie the lowest
(stream and meadow, desert, swamp)
I trample on, I keep up hope
at every everloving turn.
Each turn, that is, except
the wickedest: when cruelty
comes cackling from its
crackhouses in nature—hell
must help me then because
I lose all heart at hurt intended. Not just
humans, after all, who massacre
their cousins and their dogs. You’ll see
the crows gang up as well, with bloody beaks and
malice and intent, bedeviling some half-defeathered
brother to his death; or, dashing out the kitchen door,
the pampered shepherds lunging from
the farm-wife’s kibbled kiss, and just for this:
to fang the haunches of a fawn—not once
but seven times (it seems inexpertise is all the more
excited by the sufferer)... The heart
must bear it all, apparently, or burn, or dim, as
claw on claw the creatures in the tank
go scrambling to outclimb the creature crush.
On days like that, when cruelty is king,
and sun in swill appears to swim, I thank
no lucky stars for life: It wants to take a lover
limb from limb.