3 | "A bicycle" [vers libre]

So is this how you think you'll
invert the rules of the game?
making a virtue out of a vice
and a bicycle out of a fish?
it's true that Marcel Duchamp
made an art of not making art

but this is hardly the time
and I don't suppose you're the guy
but then you're not doing
a Duchamp are you? what
exactly are you doing? well
he played chess and worked

in secret for a long time
but that's another story

the problem of poetry
needs to be lifted out of
the problem of publication
a certain distance, I think
the problem of eating needs
to be removed from the stove

the problem of baking should
be separated from growing wheat
and threshing is another story
the rustic winnowing you'll find
in poetry books particularly
the back-to-the-land kind

imagine that! Wendell Berry
is growing tobacco in Kentucky
he's been doing it so many decades
it's never been considered a scandal
"well we grow tobacco" he told me
twenty years ago at a poetry reading