2


Why not look at art?
Why not collect up
The sagging tissues? Why
Not return to milk bottles
Braces and real tea?
Use it to settle the dust.
It is virtually certain reality
Operates through batches and memory-makers
It is virtually certain human love
Will swim through such viscid media
Seeking upriver for its birth
And if fooled
Will end

It is virtually certain
Questions will end: each one
Tested and proved, stamped on in advance
Why not just stop?

This whole business went on
Far too long
Lost a lot of words
Attrited, degraded, leached out
A taluslike slope creeping
Intermittently downwards into a broad
River of stones: moving
Into dust and wind

At the end
The machines broke
The art laughed
The flesh continued
With all the attendant emotions
Hiding and flying
Like a shoal of small, playful fish