An Easy One

[Lykren]

An ephemeral love story, disguised
as something else, for example, an arched
eyebrow, the statue of a conqueror,
a salute. What we have
is not enough; what we’ll gain
is something less than the world, but then again
can water hold its form?
Do turtles, like the wild beasts
they are, return from the pond
glisteningly wet, and strike poses
in the sun?

Here, I ask you, will you
lie down here and finish the homework
you’ve started? In the rushes
by the river the heron flaps its wings,
here is the mask, here are the necessary materials.
Wishing you a happy birthday, and the presents
I give have been scorched something awful
by currents of crackling antipathy.

The plane dive-bombs, exploding noiselessly
and veering off to the left as it goes,
where through the corner of my eye
I see a midge circling endlessly, gleaming
as from a camera lens recently polished, whirling
like the distal end of a jump-rope
just behind your ear,
and I have missed both
the conversation and the lack of it,
in which the personal became merely
a means to avoid total obscurity, and the
terra cognita of real-life events
became not so much a beauty
as an absence of affect.

Positivity is something I’d rather avoid,
if that’s what you want. But really,
are you so troubled as to be uncertain
of every last desire? This flower also
stains the world, casts a penumbra of delight
upon the carpet by the window. The world see-saws,
and like a firework gains by what it loses.
Will you have anything to do with it?