from &: A Serial Poem

Without meaningful speech or musical equipoise,

Annoyances none but hoi polloi enjoys,

Through our winding whispering galleries resound

Unwelcome, & like a tedious siege surround

Us with that ubiquitous nuisance, noise,

Which may take the shape of inflated reputation,

Able neither to stun, astonish nor astound

Those whom obscene publicity annoys,

Who prefer the decent obscurity of publication.

Regardless of the weird world’s disregard,

These works may be devoted to the wastebasket

Like the forgotten forgeries of some casket

Letters, scored for posterity & scarred

By repentance. Sentenced to a futility of hard

Leisure, answer nothing but the task it

Asks, apart from any eternal return.

Perhaps a masterpiece, unmade, unmarred,

Awaits the patient skill that will unmask it.

A lifetime passes as the phrases turn.

Immured in a single-occupancy cell,

How all manner of things shall nevertheless be well,

Will a celibate selfish as a shellfish spell

Out a corrupt & uncorrected text

So that each deleted syllable counts?

Solitude is helpless to dispel

Questions as exceptionably vexed

As unaccountable love’s unaudited accounts.

To keep your cell the way you keep your soul,

Untidy-minded, neither soiled nor sold

For next to nothing, a treasury of old

Notions like the notes of a piano-roll

Which cannot improvise though it knows a whole

Repertoire, what ought one to withhold?

Idiosyncrasy is nobody else’s business.

Of all omens the soul provides the sole

Depository. How many oceans can it hold

In its infinite & unfathomable isness?

Sealed & secured, the contents of this room

Turned our intimate alcove into a closet

Concealed behind a dirty bookcase: was it

A conservatory or a living room,

This stanza become a catacomb or tomb

That serves as a temporary safe deposit

Vault for your perduring lost & found

Mind, which articulately could presume

To ask of being what could cause it,

A question as unanswerable as profound.

Up the steps of imperfection we stumble & stall,

Blind upstarts, our feeble feet astray & unstable,

Panting after perfections we are no more able

To encompass than an imaginative animal.

While some describe the world as round as a ball,

Others maintain that it is flat like a table.

Its shape is immaterial, there like the air.

Better, perhaps, to be sorry than safe after all,

Seeing no security could enable

One to scale unscathed the inexorable stair.