66

well, it’s true, clarity is in the extremes,
whereas truth muddles in the middle: of

course, nigh onto everyone wants truth to sidle
over to where clarity is, but on the trip

qualification trips it and exception douses it
and contradiction split-chunks it and clearly

what arrives at clarity as truth is so
yellowed-weak with travail that it is just often

sent back in disgust on a return trip likely to
wear it down to nothing: what are we to do:

whew: desperate to make a dollar, some guys
on the outskirts between farming and

handymanning will borrow into front-end
gear for snowplowing and then one or two snows

fit to plow will hit the whole winter, and the
guys go under: nature is subtler than a pound

of spiders: and the next winter, likely,
bankrupt, they sit buried behind their long

roads, while we, unused, break our backs and
hearts on shovels: our destructive rage

against the unmercifulness of nature has
put us in need of saving environmentalists, who

have perhaps never happened
up on a nest of rattlers: we had to

tear down half the woods to have a door to keep
the wolves away from: don’t tell me that

fetches of wind and slugs of rain erode the
fields; where is the cabbage to come from: and

are we or are we not to give a summit or two
to the iron ore of skillets: language plays

upon what-is the way light plays on water: it
is without substance (as light nearly is):

moving, glancing, dipping, cresting is its
veracity: the ghoulish light on the water of

cisterns, tomb-stale: the flitting flickers
of flinty ice crystals nearly too light to

land: the honey weight of heat waves: evil
shakes in the shadows it shuns the light to

find: light apparently travels in the dark
becoming visible as the object it strikes, even

the deep blue heaven on those sucked-dry
skinny-bright days the commingling of light

with atmosphere: (alas, the once great Mozart
is now Muzak): my science may be right or

wrong but telling you about it is the truth:
all this dithery dawdling, I can’t get going