21. The Mainspring
The circle
widens east and west
over the Midwest and near-east
near the lake. It widens on a rocking
horse and inside the blueberry straws of
Styrofoam cups. It is a circle that circumnavigates,
that encloses and affixes gas stations to scruffy syllables
before they become monuments. It finds weight in letters and images.
The circle widens
against my desire for
order within the circle. I
imagine the periphery is fixed, a
difference measured against where I
started, a straight line of feet and miles
or a flexible estimate: how distant the mountains
are now that I have crossed them and watched them sink
into new wreckage
and listened to hard rain
that I have heard somewhere before
where the circle was already wide and full
of everything, and dark. In truth, the circle is old,
dotted with trees and haggard colonies that live in the
desert interminably, that live in a circle of allotted portions past
that are neither within nor without their bounds. The circle makes
a sphere of
itself, a glossary
of a thousand exposures,
or else becomes a transparent bowl
in which any dot may be connected with any another.
It inflates and the sun shines on grass and mud for awhile,
shines on children swinging naked into a pond, swimming and
feeling for the first time the fish that swim with them, tickling their feet.
