1.
It is about the lightness and delicacy
poets use to detect the real in Reality—
there, while under the weight of the Rolling
stones, those sponges of gravity, is the
minuscule sound of the tiny grains
too small to be affected by the roller
smoothing crystal gravel for the seal.
2.
The little book I read, as the vehicle
captained by your mother travels
the narrow black strip of these few years
we have together, sea, sock, and salt smell
of you, in your headphones, short enough
to have your feet up on the dash, not bored
with your parents yet, this slim, low
volume book is also about the placement,
the containing, and defusing of the feeling
of the fine sandy gold and copper grains,
petrified woods, the clear quartz underneath
black roads for the life of the sealed
carparks, highways, and passing lanes.
3.
And now I am writing in a smaller book.
But you can’t read it, and I will not talk
about it yet. And if my voice has made it
to you, my small, persistent chirping— a cicada
near an airport— Poets, we are happy
with the dull clunk-clink of a coin dropped
into the open case, playing our feather touch
on the gravity-tight strings of a red guitar;
in contrast to what your mother imagines,
with municipalities allowing street performers,
I like to picture you emerging on the footpath,
with the handprints and shoe indentations,
the gold stars set with the ground crystal
of cement —the telling is truer than the thing told,
and a man will beg and a woman will go off
in a huff and regret it all her life—but this
can also play out in the opposite, or two
positive poles and a current won’t flow through
the all day and night noise, the roaring large
transmission of industry, more than poetry
will ever achieve, the telling is truer than
what is being told. I am creating cavities
inside persistent noise to appreciate the quiets of poetry.
Great trifecta Dean