Monday, April 21, 2014

Gravity of a Self-Consuming Self-Proliferating Blind















VANTAGE

Alan Shapiro

From where I watch, there are no highest leaves,
no leaves that don’t have over them more leaves
impeding what they open up and out for,

darkening downward as they feed on green
diminishments, as if dark, if it still
can darken, could be itself the light

the darker leaves beneath are hungry for.
From where I watch even the shade hungers
And is hungered after—all along the chain

past bark, root, leaf, ghost speck of leaf,
microbial scrapings, and beyond them, flakes
chipped off of flakes off of a now-

no-longer anything sucked dry, unsifted
and unsiftable into so fine a green
even the dark shines through. What’s hunger but

a hole to fill, gravity of a self-
consuming self-proliferating blind
and densely tangled maze of this from that,

from this, somewhere inside of which a cry
for mercy isn’t heard, or is, and the jaws shut,
and the very dirt becomes the dirt of it.              



3 comments:

  1. Remember, the financial sector clusterfuck is a Democratic Party clusterfuck.

    Silly BDR! Only emo-proggies remember stupid stuff like that.
    ~

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  2. book man blac' j., a distant relative of mine passed away.. . ,an elder , the distance being of where in oh,ca. of his living and writing of , to my always in ont. ,tor. ,of near glenn's haunts (of another relative ) , his teaching south of here only a small part of ..living more west of and of the east coast , alistair macleod , of gravity

    ReplyDelete
  3. Robert Smith (1959) and Glen Hansard (1970), too.

    ReplyDelete