Here's What Baffles Me

Poems carve a rocky unavailing path:
cut a swath from jabberwocky to the joke,
from elegy to lusting limerick. I poke
as if there were an overwhelming realm
beyond the visible: a notion, now, I wonder
if I shouldn’t think was risible; but that
would be another joke – another poke –

one more provisional conclusion: an illusion.
Here’s what baffles me: why sometimes
I can ride the surf and feel like there’s
no finish to a thing – and other times
I sink into a turf of quicksand: nothing
here but empty end. Sometimes, darling,
in the Teflon of your temperament it’s even

worse: I think that I will slide – nay, shoot –
into a point of vanishing so small that it
will be as if nobody ever was at all. How
does one devise a way to feel alive with you?
You look as if it ought to be a breeze.
But though I seethe and try to see
and seize you with my poetries, we freeze.


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