1. The Ideal of Totality

Behold the deep interior trauma
Midway between wound and scar
Healing with imperceptible deliberateness

Why must it always be pain and suffering
Why must it always be trauma
Why never the sweetness of oranges at daybreak

Pleasure however noble flies
But pain persists living and durable
The bosses the teachers whose word was law

Whose word becomes part of oneself
And so express apprentice the whole shebang
The wound the scar and the fleeting sweetness

2. The Fragmentary Ideal

But pleasures too leave their residue
And the greatest of them haunt like trauma
And return unexpectedly

And their sporadic recurrence will not suffice
Nor should anyone demand as much
To resolve the ragged gash

No person is perfect whole or entire
But reliant upon poor humanity
To live tentatively up to the pale hour of death

Senility is a kind of mercy
That blunts the blade and blurs the rose
In memories of memories of memories

3. The Unruly Complication

No mythic fall from primal perfection has occurred
Things did not fall apart upon a day
Nor will they soon coalesce in the brilliant telos

Perennial problem exacerbated
By the times and my own incapacity
Everybody searches for solace for healing

And yet exceptions obtain
So no
You can’t say it all or anything much in these little broken lines

A fragmentary expression of the whole shebang
Or an exhaustive survey of one or two pieces
Fall and the beautiful banal maple