4 | "A-Frame" [vers libre]

It would seem inadvisable
to try to put everything in the poem
a poem is not a smorgasbord!
and it's not a storage space
of the sort you now think
you'll soon be filling up --

since you're determined
to vacate the basement where
you've been eking out this
reasonable excuse for existence
for ten years, heading to India
and California as you say --

a place to store what you can't
bear to part with among your things

but arranged any-which-way so long
as it fits the dimensions of the little
industrial rectilinear enclosure --
is a poem more like a house?
perhaps an idealised house the way
I can now imagine my Walnut Creek

A-Frame in its field by the willow
where the frogs would sing in those
parts of the year given to raining
the field would flood and frogs
the singing frogs would sing!
with I alone in the room listening

that's more like it if you're asking
me what a poem can be thought of
as resembling -- in terms of the
question of structure and space --
you were always a bit cluttered then?
but the poem doesn't remember



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This is the fourth in a cycle of eight poems. For the full sequence, see:
By the willow