beginnings

V.125 The Seventh Day

Only the finest and most active animals… – Nietzsche

On the seventh day, I rested.
I took my little boots, went out
and sat in the memorial garden.
Tears were licked from my eyes by time.

Cherry blossom was on the trees
a rusty angel holding wreaths.
I thought how, once built, a bridge lasts –
a stone bridge outlasts us, and sings.

Dreams of war danced in the cold night.
In rooms, piles of ancient books loomed.
The sun isn’t something missing
it’s an overflow of hot thoughts –

that dances on the horizon
and tricks us by travelling so slow.
I wanted to say this: thank you,
here is a Picquot tray of tea.

Like tidal waves upon a cliff
this came to me, this old feeling,
made me take a seat and begin
thinking the odds and ends again.

Oh, all my help and those I harmed
– joy hands on joy to us and then,
like lava at tectonic rifts
from this, may things begin again

With this poem, we will approach
obliquely, a statement about
beginnings and introductions.
We will take the correct approach

not taken by the author in
their own preface, which was written
by an entirely different crux
of forces than the text itself

and let’s not start on how poets
enhance and distort the way words
arrive from the constellations
by talk of love and stars and more

distortions. We will take up more
than the text itself; biographs,
scans, scansions and resonances
autopsies, trials and physics

also the being of beings
themselves. We will make it present
in a way pure and crystalised.
Just the thought of you crossing this

road ten years in the past is quite
enchanting to me. This poem
will confuse, and then begin to
make sense, I promise. To begin,

Best not to pronounce to a thing
its end, until the subtle end
is so current as to be read
easily in the cirrus and high

cumulus of the dull cloud-banks
spelled in mile high text out along
the north sea. Where it says – the end.
Like the end of an early film

perhaps with a full orchestral
fanfare and winged horses, what not.
Then it’s probably okay to
call it. Though we can just click

watch again. Let’s start it over
right now. A big bang, transformations,
and stellar forces spinning like
a universal whirligig

and then things happen and so on.
Really not much changes as things
grow more spread out until one thing
is quite the same as the other!

And beginnings are just as odd.
So, I let a few days go by, till
I thought their tears must be dried;
and then I set off for Pisa.