REPULSIVE THEORY

Little has been made

of the soft, skirting action

of magnets reversed,

while much has been

made of attraction.

But is it not this pillowy

principle of repulsion

that produces the

doily edges of oceans

or the arabesques of thought?

And do these cutout coasts

and incurved rhetorical beaches

not baffle the onslaught

of the sea or objectionable people

and give private life

what small protection it's got?

Praise then the oiled motions

of avoidance, the pearly

convolutions of all that

slides off or takes a

wide berth; praise every

eddying vacancy of Earth,

all the dimpled depths

of pooling space, the whole

swirl set up by fending-off—

extending far beyond the personal,

I'm convinced—

immense and good

in a cosmological sense:

unpressing us against

each other, lending

the necessary never

to never-ending.