Quiddity

Norse runes and Mayan god glyphs
Encoded cycles of thirteen. Our Gregorian
Calendar contains four seasons of thirteen,
Snugly fitting into fifty-two weeks. If

There existed, ever, outside of a word for this
Experience of the intermittent stream
Misunderstood variously by itself
As an awareness, a self, an eye, a thing, and if

That self in its thing caught the faintest whiff
Of a smell, an approximate incense, wood smoke
Incensed with the vaporous appearance of temporizing
Contemporary explanations of existence, and if

That self in its cell decided to call it quits
After being confounded by being transparent
In the equivocal fogs of learning, leaning like
A silvered wood, moss-devoured boathouse in the mist

That falls and falls without falling, finally, down this
Increasingly irrelevant, slippery slope, creaking
And cracking, then gone, into the nonsense
Below the reeking, fishy surface of everything, unmissed,

Uninhabited, an unhouseled house of the margins, and if
The solution to all the dissolute weariness closing in
On the carious shore were to  rebuild the rebuttal,
The doughty redoubt out of fresh cedar sticks and splits,

So that these ever-cloudy hopes were forced to fit
Their clinging selves around precisely arbitrary,
Geometric, tongue-in-groove dimensions
In which that corner matched, tongue-in-cheek, to this

One, a solid seeming structure that willed to list
But will not, will remain symmetrical, purposed
And repurposed, until the end of time or some other
Such fuming fireside dream of an apocalypse, as if

A thing with tilted shapes braced to fit could miss
The irony of an entirely wooden spirituality,
An entirely immortal soul made of mortal matters,
An undesirably self-referential kiss, a velvet fist

Of fingers clutching themselves as they itch
Inside their lathe-and-plaster glove of heaped-up,
Nailed together, glued apart at the seams
Lives before they were them or this was this

Or it was possible, however risible, even to mix
Such metaphors, such a whipped-up contrivance
Of new wood, old words, cheek pecks and pecker-fretted
Doubts about what will hold against gods like this

Thing named for a life, which is as all life is,
One damn continuous rhythm after another, impossible
To contain or constrain by number or name
But weirdly amenable to mixed-up weirdness, like this

Heap of sweepings in the corner of its own dry bliss,
Keeping fifty-two birthdays company under cedar shakes,
Under the dry rot of the eaves, of bending shelves that shall
Compress to shells comprised of calendars, then this.