Chase the Eye

Chase the eye’s prize and turned inside, one mind to recollect all of the passing,

the structure inherited of a thousand generations now somehow accessible by

concentration and the attention to actual things, their origins and

the places they play in the mind.

Things don’t speak English, not a treatise or a bank of information,

the mind’s eye is already cracked, biased, bending the light to its needs,

framing its wants around curtains of frailty, mountains of others who also had their say,

going down both to drink and in inheritance, randy as the Spring forested with bunnies, cats and man.

Why the woman drives the psyche inside is beyond more’ or habit, song

of longing, her own song of loss, of mis-spent agency and oppression.

Diaphanous the days’ veils, heavy the water pot and clay makings where

the stains of the natural order are reflected and capture the same things I am after,

the trees, light, each other.

My actual place of talking or singing and the stone sets,

a corner or a river bank, the leaves in the water going by or

as in the city coldly blowing her hair as she fastens tighter the chords of her coat.

Tell me about your hands and sympathies long left, of children who mutter restless

at the grave side festivities. There is food, a solemn but hopeful reading and

after a while the boy is in his room watching the building snow storm from the window.

Zhivago, the cold steppes and the dead.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures