of the news but of the evolving net
writing poetry throws out,
wanting
to
include, hesitant to
look back, knowing violence and
the moral impossibility of balancing
the refugees, the pit champ and the hare–
or is the poem to fictionalize such
a balance, is it to hang each with a counterbalancing
weight so that, clearly unequal , they
float over to an immense ear, an Ithacan
grotto, as the magical things upon which
the homecome wanderer rests his head?
It
is too easy in a world that refuses dockage
to refugees to play on the spit out pit,
to allow the Odysseus of one's imagination
to rest for more than a moment on
an archetypal pillow in which hare,
champ and refugee are bees, producing
a distinct but unified Mass, an eatable
hosea, a surge toward a drooping prophesied head
from which flows a common honey
-tu viens, cheri? This structure
must include a sweetness in bed
as well as the mascara in the coffin-
deep rue St.-Denis doorway where the empty
champ touches the abscessed refugee,
where he mounts her in the hold of
a dingy, stranded before a lighthouse coyote.
