20 August 2011

How do words work?

Composed a small poem on the way back from the grocery store (hauling our weekly bounty of surprise produce from New Leaf), thinking of the way in which I'm pulled toward and always slightly repelled by symbols, allegories, lessons. 


(Title credit: my initial mishearing of the refrain of "Wordy Rappinghood," from the Tom Tom Club record I picked up in Nebraska this past weekend.)


Reforesting
Sunny now, but in the wind the trees
shed pieces of their hoarded silver on me

the excessive richness of this world forever spilling
over into the stiff hands of metaphor, whether
we give it there or no. And that portion
of its assets frozen --
                                   Too hard myself,
to ever chafe at the conditions of
the small security the world ekes out for us
and for itself, parent of limited means and vast
awkward benevolence. Together so we go reforesting
the landscape, wet tree upon
wet, dense, translucent tree.

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