It is a world of words to the end of it
But the world does not give spontaneously of
The molecular much less the atomic or the subatomic substrate
As of objects direct indirect or prepositional
Or the more exotic object complements or ablative absolutes
Or the phonological intricacies of diphthong fricative nasal and stop
Or even less of those vague pervasive interfluvia namely words generally considered
Which sometimes manifest themselves as complex atmospheric oscillation
Measurable as frequency amplitude and harmonic series
Or glyphic renderings in stone parchment paper sidewalk or the cloud
And sometimes as the occult synaptic tides of cortical exertions
Leopold Bloom’s The rol the roll involuntarily lilting
Silent occasion for modest embarrassment in necropolitan carriage
And is rol a word

Let us resort then to the analogy of a planet
Nobody makes a new continent ocean or mountain range
The attempt would erupt as the height of Nimrodian hubris
But oars might smite the winedark waves
Old MacDonald drive tractor and harrow over the north forty
The city fathers break earth for the new municipal edifice
Or capital rip the bowels from Mother Earth at Hambach
And thus mundane violations disturb intactness
But poetry is of the heaven

People have their conflicts
Nature’s peace is riven by predator and prey
Direst cruelty drives innocence into the wilderness
And all return to the one life that is their home
From which they only seem to have departed

We are the rotting flesh that the maggots eat
We are the buzzing flies that the fish eat
We are the leaping fish that the bears eat
And we creeping maggots love the bears’ putrescent meat

A child sat for breakfast at his grandparents’ table
Who served him milk in their own morning mug
This must be snowman coffee the child exclaimed
Delighted to shatter the categories so assiduously assigned
Since the germination of the australopithecine hyoid bone
And grandma brought forth no broom
For no shards threatened the three-year-old fingers
The holy communion intact of family and friends

Long years ago in good King Arthur’s time
All this fair land full filled with fairies was
Who caused great harm to milk and child ‘tis true
Unless the harm issued from priest or sage
Till weight and measure drove them underground
Where yet they dance and sing their fairy round
Still undisturbed by physicist or priest

So there is but the one great poem
To which all donate their mutational allotment
Prizewinners
Bullshitters
Con artists
Sighing lovers
Ruthless demagogues
PA announcers at the calf-roping event
Monks low-intoning Buddhist or Gregorian
Cantors muezzins and yodobashis
Yodelers carolers and trick-or-treaters
Nananana Nananana Hey Hey Good-byers
Singing waiters cabbies and costermongers
Participants in twelve-step programs
Preschool teachers
Bureaucrats compu’er says no
Harmless drudging lexicographers
Sparkling fairy princesses with their unicorns
Readers aloud of news sports and weather
Litigators
Speechwriters
Andean players on the pipes of Pan
Traveling salesmen
Debaters
Mrs. Paroo in the high school musical
Infielders keeping up a lively chatter
Shady characters who employ the argot of the underworld
Achilles and Dido and other shady residents of that other underworld who colloquize or refuse to with Odysseus and Aeneas and other sojourners there
Contributors let us grudgingly concede to social media
Auctioneers
Dalangs
Imitators of bird calls
Jump-roping chanters
Pointy-bearded professors mortarboarded and pince-nezed
Cheerleaders
Pop stars
Painted mummers
Baggy-pantsed comics
Garrulous checkers players
And crooning mothers to their babes
To say nothing of the sounds and sights of nature
The elegant murmurs of beast fowl herb fish and insect
Nurturing Earth her textures and her colors and her beneficence despite everything
The irresistible refulgence of His Majesty the Sun
The signs and wonders shining forth from air sea and sky
All that is sensible or imaginable
Each an intrusion
Each a violation yes but not such as breaks a bubble or singes a sleeve
Not charioted by Bacchus and his ravenous pards
Not even on wings as the curling falcon
But wafted upon such breezes
As from the heaven blow