Get At The Gods

You name in all the ways that you can find
to name – whom else could you blame for wrongly
rendering the thing? Maybe most providers
of the language don’t much fuss about their

epigrams and sobriquets, but you are daily
flummoxed by the awkward dismal grays
which leak out when you want to warble purple,
gold or azure: wander though you may through

pastures of blue possibilities to find a shade
to translate on a page which sings and signals sky:
oh my. You’re left with nothing but your
constitutionally hungry, unfed eye. So why must

you keep trying? It continually seems just plausible
that if you’d just keep spying – catch it unaware,
just once, you might not be the dunce you’ve
so far been – it might be possible, in this great

hunt to say the thing within outright and well,
to win. But right now every choice is hell,
and every verbal trope’s a sin. The most you’re
doing? Rocking to and fro autistically to find

in some somatic lilt some whiff of felt experience
that for a moment might assuage your guilt
at your vast incapacity to tilt with what is out there,
make a word from flesh: at least achieve a draw.

Every time so far you’ve tried you end up
sucked into the maw, with precious little left to
show for it. And still you go for it, against all
odds: to jump that fence, get at the gods.


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