Overshooting Tops

Women with scrotums . . .

Boys covered in scales.

Concrete nouns are myths

In gilt-painted clouds.

Poets have fallen

Hard for them these years

Since modernism,

So hard it’s hard work

Even finding poems

Built of abstractions—

There’s always a worm,

Precisely described,

Gritty scenes of streets,

Exacting landscapes,

Exact body parts,

Botanical names,

The luscious decor

Of rare common nouns

That verge on proper,

No ideas not things.

But prose does as well

With exact details,

With no fear of gods,

And all words are myths,

All signs abstractions.