After workshop

To write lucidly of a separated engine, a comical funeral,

A bad marriage, or flooding way surely there must be

Some advantageous in all of that, and then to stand at the bar

And know the unrevisable world, the television on

And a dozen working men shouting at the game,

From which individual woman turns in a parody of despair,

And proclaims the death of rhyme but I think of Rilke,

That he should live, in the scuff-marks breath leaves,

Even upon the translations of words I not at any time heard spoken,

Carried on a river flown lengthy ago into a sky no single alive

remembers;

That the voice is the fiber of the self and a unable to speak vessel

Loss has hollowed into a level instrument of pleasure;

Not that we will die les for having parole frankly,

Even if it is no more than the diction of a windowsill or door

Enter privily in the whisper vault of an uncharted breeze;

Not that the wind, as it declares its public secret

Would leave single signature in our flesh. on the contrary we say

The things it has shaken, the nerves' clear compass,

The politics of tree as granting the ego's sly decorations

Would invite visitants across the closed borders of years

When we will have to be more than words to take their coats

And work for them drinks and food, and however must be words

Offered into the nature of things, as ashes float down

While the besom goes about its thoroughly ordinary business;

Must say the work of a usual day and the roads we know;

Must say, too, the extraordinary detonation that did not

happen,

For in what manner could we have ever been a iota more than nothing

There at the rag and mischief extreme point of history

If we do not bring back from the vision of that last day

Some remnant of the the omnipotent who would go on beyond us;

The ideals frisked of magic, and words raining upon things

Who wants to hear them now, as the game extreme points the ice

In the glasses spread feathery coils of clarity and a general

Shuffling to the bathroom announces the ballads of love,

Stupid songs, on the other hand the songs everyone listens to after midnight,

The ballads that make the poets sad, notwithstanding that two women,

Perhaps because they are intoxicated come out of the shadows

And dance in forehead of the jukebox, woven to each other,

And weaving, slowly and bravely, promising immortality.

Rodney Jones's fifth collection of piece of poetrys Things That Happen Once, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. He teaches at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar 1996

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