Syllabic Mist

Interest comes when pleasure does –
and pleasure comes as you fall deep
into the lap of this green-gray thick August day –
allowing your imagination to effect an exhumation
of a pith, a peeling back, a laying bare, not playing fair,
perhaps, with feeling – under-cutting every fond
illusion, plan, specific fantasy to send each reeling –
softly, murkily – into the heart of a humidity:

can you afford to go to Austria in January? –
is it possible to love a man? –
do you still want to play the violin? –
shouldn’t you peruse the fruit stands in the Sunday
farmer’s market just a few blocks down the avenue? –
is the Universe as fathomlessly blue
as that epiphany of it you knew
ten years ago in some hallucination’s druggy glue?

ah, but musing self-interrogation’s quite untrue
if it suggests that any speculation has one whit to do
with you: interest comes when pleasure does –
and pleasure’s come because you sense a fitness
in the itness of the many freedoms of syllabic mist –
questions dart and plop and flit and dip
like minnows, tadpoles in the ripples
of a listless pond: which is its own beyond.

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