POEMS
TIME
for
B.
v.
Winebaum
Ever that Everest
Among concepts, as prize for fruitful
Grapplings with which
The solved crossword puzzle has now and then
Eclipsed Blake's 'Sun-Flower'
(Not that one wanted a letter changed in either)
And jazz believed at seventeen
So parodied the slopes
That one mistook the mountain for a cloud ...
Or there was blessed Patience:
Fifty-two chromosomes permitting
Trillions of "lives"-some few
Triumphant, the majority
Blocked, doomed, yet satisfying, too,
In that with each, before starting over,
You could inquire beneath
The snowfield, the vine-monogram, the pattern
Of winged cyclists, to where the flaw lay
Crocus-clean, a trail inching between
Sheer heights and drops, and reach what might have been.
All day you had meant to write letters,
Turn the key in certain friendships,
Be ticked through at dusk
By hard, white, absent faces.
Let's say you went so far
As
to begin: "It's me! Forgive ..."
