Changing figures The dionysian child the woman in her assurances the old town in its hallucinations spilled like dominoes the mountain and the void the moon and the sun whirled from misthidden vale to vale and the day coiled in the forest A word is like an ant dragging a dead spider the meant and the unmeant So upon ragged changing seas the poem which is a ship buoyed by its hollowness on the abstruse coordinates of meaning carries the loop of its horizon forever with it Scan this circle vanishing across the deep It is contrived it is actual it is a man. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org |