Tiny Necessary Things

You want to sense the widest buoyancy
and see more than the tiny necessary certainties
that tell you where and how to move from there to here
and now to now: look out from the cosmic rear:

investigate the inexplicable, the queer: experience
the glow of what encompasses: and more,
express what your inimitable angle of the prism
makes of it: what takes from it and gives? –

what sieves impressions into art?:
you’d like a royal inroad to the inmost heart.
How many rhymes like these have you already
squeezed?: innumerable verses link the heart to art:

and where with there: and even gives to sieves:
conjures nothing new. Or have you just as much
occasion to re-rhyme as stars and moons
permit themselves to rise according to expected times?:

perhaps these tiny necessary certainties are all
that anyone can ever get: esthetically repetitive but live.
Oh, but to arrive some place beyond this space!:
to bet on something big: to rig and stage

some grand outrageous wager that would stand
to make you infinitely sager than the asininely assonant
enraged encaging poet you appear to be.
You’re more ambitious than your friends suppose.

You want to ram your rhymes up through
the Grand Designer’s nose. Some must find
your aspirations aberrant and odd: you want to cozy up,
make love to God. That might be your coda!

But: tiny necessary things! – a yellow post-it
you’d forgotten in the kitchen intervenes: “Baking soda.”
Refrigerator has an odor. Poem does as well. (Bad
or good you can’t quite tell.) All comes down to smell.


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