Unchanging

Gass writes Poetry is, in and out,
a physical carress,
and I am tongue-tied,
as incapable of touch
as I am unreceptive,
the words bound up
in the resilient sinews
of doubt and regret
and the vain search
for a fitting figure,
a metaphor encompassing as the sky
and as blue.

Verse of the epic analogy
drains me of the will to decypher;
spoon-fed by a wan hand
I have learned to seek
(guided by love songs
and bland cliches)
the uniform consistency
and flavor of gruel

when it is
the concatenated extension
of the literal
and figurative
that forms the pulsing heart
of lyric expression:

the imposition
of water on air
to form a cloud as singular
as the process is familiar
versus the subordination
of our will to whimsy
to our ardor for order,
patiently sifting data
into arbitrary phyla and families
like rolling the change
that accumulates day upon day
until it would bury us.

Gass again: Poetry is
to bring within about.
To change.
But where within is about
(or, worse, about within),
change unfathomed (and mounting),
our sky is cloudless,
the spoon mercilessly cold
in our mouths,
our sacrament unholy.