A REST NOTE


 
 
Pale sunlight through a dusty windowpane,
where I look out into the yard again
and see the clutter of autumn’s debris –
dead limbs, dead leaves, the trash-gray lees
of winter’s end.  Neglected garden, we
(you and I) might be allowed, eventually
to join an orchestral cacophony –
tuning scratchy instruments, to play
(in March) a movement of Spring Symphony.

 
Progress is measured with a marching score
(more goods, more jobs, more money, more, more)
twirling beneath peak presto movements -
start-ups, mergers, acquisitions, rents,
growth and health, longevity and youth,
success, celebrity, sway, sexiness and couth.
Yet while a jumpy world sings On the Go
nature still murmurs its adagio –
the tuning of a sphere, stately and slow.

 
How human nature’s own modes of delay
– aloof indifference, arrogant display –
jar (so dismally) with hopeful sounds!
So heedless nouveau riche playgrounds
putresce in battered, grimy neighborhoods,
and senators engraft fake common goods
to feed the fancies of pet lobbyists,
and contrite truth upon a scaffold twists
while hatred simmers and the Lie insists.

 
Across the chilly and ramshackle soil
spring stumbles, tentative (a limping girl
- Siberian, perhaps).  Slowly, slowly,
dandelion and skunk cabbage, lowly
grasses, meek and tender buds, emerge.
At night, above some vast, dark verge
of regal evergreens, a new moon floats;
you hear a rainfall, there, of slower notes;
and stillness in the creaking of the boats.