Temporary Structure


I reflect on the buckling water
Of the cold creek
Where the present is thrown together.
The world shifts on its face, and flashes up
To move in the moment of a living mind
With all this trashy wild
Liquid and lunging forth.

I am makeshift;
Lean-to of body,
A few sticks of bone;
But my unfinished life
Is part of the world,
Part of the day
My eyes borrow.

It is a world
Of mud and meter and metal,
Stamped and seamed with sense,
A bright bucket tumbling in a creek
As my heart fills and empties, and my lungs
Give and take.
Unbroken, it is beaten back and forth

New, a booming shape
Banged and battered,
Its drum curve
Beaten by water,
Its flattened crystals blazing
Jammed between rocks,
One side in silver shadow.

Possibility
Rings in present air
With resounding sense,
But rings
Like the bucket turning over in the rocks:
Turned and overturned,
Bright zinc will wear off,

The bottom pock with rust,
Each pock
Enlarge with ruin, and,
Worn to a wafer,
The whole, punctured crust
Finally crumple under a loop
Of new water into a whorl of flakes.

What theory can contain
A muddy-metaled day
Cast from a wordless world and overturned
And turned along the rush and turbulence
Of nervous surfaces,
The cold, pictured flow
Charged with a constant change?

A theory balances,
But has to move
Unstable in a moving medium
Which can resist its equilibrium:
Clatter of day,
Sky thrown to the ground,
Light leaping up the trees.

A sounding mind
Can bang a tone of joy
Out of the bucket bouncing on the rocks,
The cold change of pebbles underwater,
Or a vessel sinking,
Clogged with bitter leaves,
And settling muffled to the hidden ooze.

This physical moment,
Circumstance of sense,
Is the living memory of having lived;
A rattling vision, thrown up from this bed,
The luscious frictions of another skin
Reshape the gathered day, and scatter out
A now of nerves and words.

Where the present is given up
Off balance
And poised between
Dangers of standing still
And risks of moving,
Running improvisation undermines
Imagined futures;

Being is being in momentum in
The unfinished business everywhere
Of verb and reverberation, galvanized
In a world of many movements
To shock-bright transitive sustained in sense;
Now is an echoing
Like the hollow of the bucket hammered on.

This living framework,
Scaffold for a life,
Will plunge into a cold scattering
Of its own accord,
Or at the world's will:
The scaffolding of my language taken down
Leave an emptiness of objects.

While I can stand,
Off-balance but alive
To punctuating rocks,
The run-on sky,
Dangling weeds and snarled clause of trees
That make the long sentence of the creek
Mean what it means,

This is the place to stand,
And let reflection fall
Unsafe in the crash of futures
And ongoing trade of surfaces and depths
Overturned and turned and turned again,
From which no thing escapes or is exempt:
This theory will also be a life.