2014

"The three-and-a-half-mile section has not had a train on it since 1962."

"Sailor, you were glad / and whistled Sion by that stream."

The last crickets of autumn
Were shrill in the wind.
Things separate gradually.
They don't fall apart:

Sunsets, autumns, moonrises,
Expiring sense, inspiring
Songs, melancholy
In the tympani of those
Who were not born to hear them.
The last crickets stopped.

Winter never stops.
How can anyone bear this
World never the same,
Never discontinuous,
Never exactly new? How?

Play it for humor
Or play it for tears, it plays
You like a fiddle
In a long gale. You can't doubt
It will go on without you.

---

You and I can talk as friends.
We hail from twinned worlds.
We understand each other.
Characters answer

Back and forth like wind-plucked strings
Unaware of paradox
In their harmonies.
Allow me to make myself
Less clear. The storm this winter
Frets without our rage,

But Ruskin was wrong.
The world is not pathetic
In response to us,
True enough, but our pathos
Is a product of the world

To which we respond,
However deludedly,
As its own reply.
Sounds too deep for us to hear
Breathe words, aghast, in our ears.

---

The professor rasped. Let's keep
This simple, students.
Once upon a time there were
Real rhapsodists, real
Singers with living cultures.

This is neither time nor place
To pretend to be
Something no one ever was:
Someone never been.
Our cultures thrive in our throats.
We scrape them to discover
This beauty we are can't be.