Certain lavender durations less than a minute
Reckoned in secular time but who’s counting
And where would such registry be inscribed
Moments that like all moments deliberately experienced
Telescope but in which direction
A question that induces the familiar anxiety
Of loss of trickling through the fingers
The visitor from Porlock bearing tidings
Of mandates and trivial preoccupations
The moment seemingly inevitable of misgiving
Certain events of historical preeminence
Blacklit rich in motion in nudity
That expand into immeasurable extent
A farmer’s field a quiet meal
Smiles and earnest promises
But the woods decay
The woods manifestly decay and fall
And whose woods these are I think you know
Though you have held them in trust
For some little while reckoned in secular time
Inscribed in the public registry
Signed sealed and tucked away
And hard-won knowledge trickles through the fingers
Certain banalities difficult to dodge
As mixing incense and peppermint
Situating them in vague time of unspecified color
Let’s forgive each other darling
Let’s go down to the greenwood glen
And yet for all this nature is never spent
Though famine war and pestilence
Sweep the planet clean
It’s not the only planet
And cropping at right angles a nasty habit
Since plenitude obtains in an expanding universe
The microscopic and the macrocosmic
And of greater note some abstractions too are true
And haply of greater truth value than phenomenon
Though seen of none save perhaps
Some fortunate few
Or some cadre united in privilege
Or perhaps the congress of the willing
But how to cultivate willingness
How translate it
To the many enclosed in trauma
Spine wrapped in spiral
Or absorbed through no fault of their own
In the fine texture of command
Of unspecified color
Bent by coercion
Broken by discontinuity
Any of the many visitors from Porlock
But a small jet pierces the perfect blue
Every action even if its outcome be beauty
Occasioning risk and yet inexhaustible nature
And the number of numbers
Between any two whole numbers
And the transcendent grace of π