Untitled
after Viviane Houle
Today I read about the “failed state,”
Bellum omnium contra omnes
while I ate a raspberry yogurt, then taught
a class where a student said “Wait!
that poem isn’t boring,” then I took
the class on a walk around the statue
of a wolf holding two baskets—one
full of dirt, the other containing three
cracked oranges, water dripping
off its claws and its lit eyes looked
beyond the locked, primitive
Baptist church where we are now
walking as phantoms, past the bamboo
thickets and the cicada shells still
clinging to puzzles of bark. And now
I’m sitting under those Georgia pines
across from the old stage where
colleagues would put on plays—
Jane Eyre (but a comedy), atoms, twigs
on the stage now, things, they say,
are events, stones, events, the poem,
voice—all events, this walk is too
so jumbled now I hear the Cumberland
Island horses neighing behind
the burnt mansion of saltwater
and my song won’t go viral since
its built of buzzing edges
and events are untaggable
wind gusts from the storm last
night, I slept through the entire
thing and when I woke I made
coffee and looked across the century
I mean the yard where lawn debris
was piled high, will I get my kids to
the dentist today or was that
a goldfinch in the ditch’s red dirt—
potato chip, potato chip
or will that cicada really outlive
my poodle? Nature’s hierarchy
isn’t based on cuteness, but what
about the poet who texted
me a photo of the Duino Castle?
It looked pretty like fate or
something important. It also
looked like it would fall
into the sea or paradise.
And yet, I built of it for you with
just my breath, so I sat down in
one of its 536 golden rooms
and tried to remember
the future and it came
out as an elegy.