Let’s try the ingenuous mode, if for no better

Reason than its staying power: locked into a continuum

That rises and falls with the contours of this earth,

Inhabiting a Tom Tiddler’s ground of special pleading

And cash and carry. Long lines at the checkout counter

Are a reason to behave, sad and dramatic, silhouetted

Against the tidal wave. For what must be, must be,

The old priest said, his face a maze

Of claw-prints in the snow

Which always arrives in time to antagonize

Or humor, before bedtime, it’s your choice.

And suddenly outlines unlock

The forms they were sequestering, just to make it simple

And equal.

Ah, but all fakes aren’t alike.

I think we must settle for the big thing

Since quality, though a matter of survival,

Is such a personal call. Sometimes it’s nowhere at all

Or a faint girl will make light of it, saying

In the sprockets in the backwoods there are no noticeable

Standards, nothing to judge one or be judged by.

It’s true the refreshing absence of color

Produces an effect like that of time;

That you may be running through thistles one moment

And across a sheet of thin ice the next and not be aware

Of any difference, only that you have been granted an extension.

Make sure you clean up this mess. Other than that

Listening to widely spaced catcalls is OK

The livelong day, and sleep isn’t rationed.

Yet one can only question how the system arose,

Creating itself, I suppose,

Since nothing else has yet taken that responsibility.

If it makes you happier to feel, to see the horror

Of living one’s life alone for something, what the heck,

Be my guest, it takes two to tango

After all, or something, doesn’t it?

And you get right back on that conveyor belt

Of dreams to tip the scale modestly

Into your own enterprise, nest-egg, portfolio

Of standard greetings and uncommon manners.

The ending can’t take the blame.

It read like the cubist diary of a brook

That sidled past the house one day

On its way to a rendezvous with some river

We can never cross twice. And the gradual

Escalation lay near by: we cannot call it back

Yet may meet it again, in other times, under different auspices.