Il Piccolo
You have made here,
she witnessed,
looking at
the assemblages, a small,
a piccolo,
a paradise,
for us to bask in and,
at this time,
in this here world, right now,
with no beatitude of any kind,
but just these latitudes allowed:
hope or despair
and not a jot of will to help
make sense of it.
The reading mind,
flowing among its flowers
for these—make no mistake—
are volumes of the inner heed
and not of botany
wallows in satisfaction, a small but
genuine satisfaction
to sink in, or remain
at strict attention
where all things you could name
as pleasure, joy, or… ecstasy
have faded ineluctably while
self, in pain, condemned
to life without parole
(the inner/outer wars)
looks out the window of our time
failing to notice, passing by,
that life you failed to lead
when there was time and reason to construct it.
Thing
Passing from time to time—
so if you think the pass is timeless,
you have
one more think coming:
for pass, known as “eternity,”
the dead call time.
It is not possible
to hold in head, to
get one’s head around
the notion of
a timelessness, even as
it is not possible
to totally ingest the thing called nothing,
to totally imagine lack of thing,
of anything
you could call thing
so as to have in mind
a hold, a touch, or a caress,
or pure punch in the throat
“of your worst enemy”
and then behavior.
Even by the attempt to stress
to overcome unthinkables by stressing
as in, say,
“nothingness of nothing,”
still you will not defeat
how long a life will take to live,
on the only hand.
How endlessly thing death is.
‘’’Il Piccolo’’ and “Thing,’’ by Nathaniel Tarn, from Gondwana, copyright 2017 Nathaniel Tarn. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
