Waiting Light.
The water in the slow moving,
cool-breeze clouds
- stretched cotton,
fleeced,
with the blue shot softly through -
crystallized in a ring of thin banded
light early this afternoon;
the product of an equation generously counted out
by the whiteyellow sun,
over the hill,
above the old convent's hatted bell
and i thought about the crystal somewhere buried in my machine-
between computing and the current-
dolling out the careful waves of energy;
the clock cycles of code;
the heart beat of gestures.
Of how a maker emerges sometimes, unexpectedly like love,
and crystallizes currents
of ideas and desires -
how Defoe became Crusoe
to condense into a listed, layered light
the twisted fears and dreamings
of early, lonely capital.
How Walcott and Chamoiseau speak the lyrical new polyglot of those seas now.
How Eliot taught me that we each confirm our prison,
but Pound crystallized the whole long world of longing sorrow
with blue plums