This Myth of a Myth of Origins

(For Sarah and Leah and James to Remember)

One night in the bed of winter,
Snowy sheets and cloudy blankets
Rucked up around a drafty house,
The man who passes for this poem
Considered the nature of doubt
And came to the dim conclusion
That everything poems consider
Summed with everything poems leave out

Amounts to no more than the truth,
In this oneness of all that is
And all that isn't the oneness,
In the contemplation of all that could
Be contemplated in one sense
As the act of contemplation:
The act of the poem of a mind,
Which actually must be nonsense.

"I'm too tired to think," thought the poem,
Trying to rise above the snow
Heaped to muffle a winter's night,
"Too tired for a better excuse,"
Then spotted the switch of a light
Lit by the light the switch turned on
And turned on itself, ruthlessly,
"So that's the truth about this light."