The World

I knaw the greit unstabilnes

Brukkill as glas

Cresseid referred to character,

Her own, and fate from the fickle gods,

Who rewarded her with leprosy

For daring to complain. But you know

Those phrases, the great unstableness

Of things, brittle as glass, your own way.

This is not the world. This is a poem

On the origin of frailty.

You could never drag the world in here,

Not even as a simple model.

And yet, you can’t keep frailty out.

You have to presume it’s pervasive,

The world’s frailty, its brittleness,

But unevenly distributed.

Cresseid must be exceptional

To make so many bad decisions.

You must also be exceptional,

To break over and over again.

Glass must be exceptional to crack,

To have become the type specimen

For brittleness. But it’s in the world.

It all begins in the world, the great

Unstableness that demands all change

And then the places where change is slow

And builds up to an unevenness,

Potentially discontinuous,

As when a bone breaks or a poem ends.