Infinite Clarity

Five nights have gone by and not one owl of
poetry has hooted to me out of his tree

Three moths fly in the room from flitter to flitter
their universe perfect within themselves
looking out through tiny cockpit eyes
to navigate from one light to another

Twenty-foot crocodiles slither across delta mud
sometimes leaving perfect imprints of their crocodilic forms
down to perfectly printed toes and plated scales

Moonlight slips quietly into a glass on a windowsill
reflects in the liquid glisten in one flashing eye and even
two flashing eyes at the same time

or a puddle of piss a dog’s left next to a bush
or a zillion or so other earthly reflections

Yet the moon remains itself wherever it
lands always the same white disc throughout its
unfazed variations

It’s all in the rhythm and phrasing that this
multitudinous world gets played out in discrete jerks and pauses
exclamations and praises

which makes its natural condition more like
continuous song than continuous silence

I’m sitting on my bed and a single beige moth keeps
landing or flittering zigzaggedly above my two black pillows

Where will we go O God that we can’t
see now but You see with
infinite clarity?

And Your pure moonlight lands on
with absolute reflectivity?

---

2/13/2007 (from Invention of the Wheel)

Categories: Poems, Love