Migration of Forms

Women’s work is never done

Incest avoidance and baby-talk

Debits debated, the cat in the snow

Mother tongue loaded, migration of forms

 

Nevertheless, things slip away

The empty quarter is rarely attained.

It’s always jam yesterday, jam tomorrow

What about today?

 

We swim each moment in tragic distraction

Anguish disguises the beautiful circuits

The nature of thinking is multi-track.

 

The familiar forest

as structuring boundary,

a last Grimm fable to

thwart pique ruffle deflate abash

 

Yet in some no-man’s-land

between the tabloid and the treatise

a noise outside the code can cause mutation,

squadrons of messenger birds

descending on the cranium unheralded

 

Some mastery of attention is possible

such stretches of purity as cannot be

paraphrased, safaris extended into yourself

 

The hard thing to notice is what’s not there