Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth
filters the broth, looking for the transparent, the colorless essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommé: the
open anxiety breezes through thick conceits, surface congestions (it likes metaphors deep-lying, out of sight, their airs misting
up into, lighting up consciousness, unidentifiable presences), it distills consonance and assonance, glottal thickets, brush
clusters, it thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires
level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries, hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation
matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high suasive turnings, mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps.
“Anxiety’s Prosody” originally appeared in Poetry (© October 1988) by the Modern Poetry Association and was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, ed. Donald Hall; series ed. David Lehman (New York: Scribners, 1989). Reprinted with permission of the Editor of Poetry.