Way Out of Line
A collage of lines borrowed from a few of my favorite poems
Fine lines shine in poems.
Incandescent, intensely hot from the fusion of words that form them.
Charming like a flowering Champaca that waylays you along a nocturnal trail with a sudden whiff of scent; as a magpie robin’s elaborate, earnest tunes make you look up from the morning paper.
I pluck these off the verse, as I do the flowers from trees. I arrange them in a bouquet, and they still take your breath away. But it is most gratifying to see trees in full bloom. Brilliant though, flowers strung on a garland are a shade duller than those that dazzle on a branch. What strains could be more melancholic than those of a bird in captivity?
Yet, the damage is done.
Today, I wear them as trophies or prop them up on my vase, until they wither.
It was evening all afternoon.
Stop here, or gently pass!
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I’ll
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
No layoff
from this
condensery
I too, dislike it.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
impractically shaped and — who knows? — self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
the precarity of their bodies made only of body.
Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties
That come to us as dreams.
It’s not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing.
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
Tomorrow, they’d make pleasant potpourri.
