Jumps from one lily pad of idea to a pool
That promises a wash and irrigation
Of clotted selves and suburban use,
Of tanks and storage,
Guns and full aisles at the store.

Are we needed to buy more or do with less.
A simple life of talking and ample time.
The subject of our discourse is you,
Reader, subject, self.

The titrate of tools used
Is as yet unindexed.
Quantum,
Change as ever to picture the voids they say
May one day predominate
In vast parsecs of the substance
Of elastic math and intuition the young monk knows
As emptiness.

A hologram of perfection
Driven by its flaws,
Slight medium for transmission,
Back to you, our subject prime.

Mediums and mystics around the chalice,
The table, the stone, the time, the tree, the axis mundi,
Goldilocks of the Ocean of Story
Heading out to be devoured
Or to confront her oppressor, sharp teeth and all.

A placid animal nature is called upon as guide,
Good Dante of the subterranean as much as heaven,
Patient, eternal, illusory.

It is not the narrative but the poem I am after.
Not the notion but the motion,
Turning the merry go round of your mind,
Supple as the watching streetlight,
Deep as the shadows turning.

To place the jug of the clairvoyant’s table just so,
In the middle, in the classroom,
Like the plastic tank displaying maggots
Cleaning from a squirrel a skeleton so pure
That the dust of white time seems as omnipresent
As the static everywhere, somehow worth description,
Attention, tracking us forward and backward in time.

The distance is a happy ray of sun,
Nothing for children to fear.
Padding along in sock feet or
Jumping stone to stone across the creek
In our boots, exploring,
The paddle upstream,
The negative to everyone’s positive thinking.

Thinking that clay makes motion.
That earth spawns,
That the feather rub and tortoise shell have an intricate star shine
As water might cover or freeze.
Quantum mumble, yum yum yum.

Breakfast again in the afternoon, sleeping the day away.
Bashful Prince and Princess of stone immortalized
To the cool cheek of elements,
The disparate tortures of dissolution.

In solution, beaker of identity,
Cap stone of marshy low lands where
Best to roll up your cuffs from the mud,
No shoes, cold in the air as evening approaches
On a wind like a stranded Winter
Leaving us out of season
Like the aftermath of a fire,
Stripped naked now
As the trees between blush and death.

Between us now and then,
Pet and Master,
Crowd and individual.
Water him and she will grow.