The world overflows with sensory delight
Cold indeed are they who shun
The joys of physical plenitude
That passes before us in glorious show
The chevrons on the wings of blackbirds
How they vary from ocher to deepest red
Sometimes rimmed with gold
The cardinal pair the scarlet and the pale
Colors derived like the pink of spoonbills
From their diet
The tormented feedback cadenza in Machine Gun
Cymbal and sistrum and pipe
The shop brimful of ladders buckets and pliers
Implements that make joyful noise when upset
Orchids their complicated anatomy
Cuttlefish their psychedelic lightshows
Hummingbirds their iridescent hover
Sound word sentence image figure
Rhythm melody harmony timbre pitch
Line color shape scope gestural application of lively paint
That give us to recognize the transcendent facticity of the one great poem
Oak hickory sweetgum tulip-tree pine
Palm banyan magnolia cherry beech
Dogwood in spring like lace sprinkled upon the forest
Maple in autumn the cold fluid flame
Pansies marigolds black-eyed Susans
Mid-May’s eldest child the coming musk rose
Full of dewy wine
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
Clover the small the medium and the large
Coral the flat the round and the branching
Predator prey arboreal swinger nocturnal sophisticate
A nighttime flight with view of city lights
And the lights too of sparsely populated regions
Portly beavers and sleek otters
Phlegmatic sloths and resolute koalas
Spider monkeys and lanky gibbons
That brachiate with the ease of Sunday strollers ambling in the park
Cheetahs with jingle bells on their collars
Herds flocks pods packs schools
Huge flights of birds how they turn as one
Huge shoals of fish how they mingle and separate
Their silvery surfaces reflecting light
Clown-fish remora wrasse and goby
Fishy cleanup crews for submarine crime scenes and office parks
Reptiles the confident cylindrical and the forehanded domed
The ritual artistry of rolling a joint
The fragrant curl of smoke when the joint is lit
The goatleg boy dragging with rope the head of a beast
Terrestrial crustaceans
Aquatic mammals
Arboreal crabs
Heavenly hosts of choral voices
A draft of vintage and purple-stainèd mouth
Nature in her moods contemplative and intoxicating and awe-inspiring
The rites mysterious of connubial love
The stately improvisation of the mockingbird
Not mocking at all but respectful of its sources
Which it weaves in intricate synthesis
With inclusion of brilliant original material
How like that other Bird Charlie Parker virtuoso incomparable
To say nothing of his compatriots on drums bass piano and trumpet
How like the incomparable ballet of the bats
And chimney swifts batlike in their aerial agility
Those substances attractive to bug bird and beast alike
Those substances filth to humans
But to other creatures nourishment and nursery
Sometime approximation of the sphere
The green thorn that draws blood red as the rose
The pebbly desert mountain
The cresting wave crashing on the pumice
The young woman who slips her garment off
Under the water of the motel pool
Heia jaheia heia jaheia
Wallala la la la leia jahei
The butter yellow butterfly that browses among the flowers
Oblivious of its truncated right wing
The song of love
The song of joy
The song of sorrow
The massive crowd singing along with a superstar
The wild three-year-old her curly red hair
How she kissed the palm of the hand that stroked her curly red hair
The angry and ecstatic grace of Nina Simone
The clouds wispy or accumulating or ripply or streaky or gray
Their constant metamorphosis
The sunlight that stabs like dagger or drips like honey
The slender crescent moon flirtatious in misty clouds
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Cows who come when you call them
Fishes in ponds who gather expecting a meal
The mosaic floor depicting the pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales
The mosaic floor depicting the Songs of Innocence and Experience
The mosaic floor depicting the dolphin-torn the gong-tormented sea
Toshiro Mifune taking arrows in Throne of Blood
Brad Pitt extracting arrows in Troy
The bliss of The Swing
The torture of The Raft of the Medusa
Chile relleno at Jalisco
The sunlight alongside the Fighting Temeraire
Impossible upon earthly frame but perfect in pictorial ocean
The city skyline that suddenly and unexpectedly rears
The flowers that grow in ditches in southeast Texas
The jetty at Fernandina the limpets urchins and anemones
The slubby skin of a torpedo that shocks when you stroke it
Marilyn Monroe’s sculptural nudity Venus aborning
The mosquito’s abdomen engorged with blood
The mad scientist’s assemblage of terrifying apparatus
The conspirators’ whispered colloquy by light of stumpy candle
The astronaut’s journey through realms of light
After having defeated the insane computer
The flaky crust of a Cuban sandwich
Hector’s farewell to Andromache how his infant son is frighted by his plume
Athletes their beautiful movements reminiscent of the hunt
The hunter’s making peace with the quarry
For the quarry lives and the forest lives and lives too the course of the arrow
Cole Porter as rendered by the Comedian Harmonists
The intoxicating incense at high mass
A bowl of chili and a PBR at Moe’s and Joe’s
The busy metropolis beneath a rotting log
Stevie Wonder opening with Superstition before the Rolling Stones
The swoop of power lines on A1A at Jupiter Beach
Crazy Cuban flute despite the effort to jam the signal
The infant’s face upon the first experience with a spoon
The woman in the kimono on W 27th street
Her joyful expression meeting the taxicab
Her radiant skin when she removes the kimono
Guinness after Guinness while discussing The Seventh Seal
The old man’s whistling while he inspects the grounds
The stone pulled from a river smooth but not lacking in texture
The sublime tactic of raising the glamorous image of Bacchus and his pards
Only to dismiss it
The second movement of the seventh symphony
All the songs
tuffm I zimbra
All the plays
All the pictures
All the dolmens petroglyphs and cave paintings
Truthful earnest of the one great poem
A cheap American lager after a year on the wagon
The enormous orange tabby lustrous and judicious
How he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation
Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock at Hiroshima
The entrance to the Paris Métro like a fragrant curl of smoke
The voice trained in luxurious vibrato
The untrained voice especially that of children
Embromeom col pmisti effrent
Birds of undistinguished plumage
Animals of mouse color and of hyena color
Slow moving like Sysiphus the scarab
Who drives the emblem of the unconquered sun
Ay the very turd itself
Approximation of the sphere
Expressive of the will to express
Etta James busting it out her arm in a sling
The curving road beside the Columbia river
And a bighorn sheep that trots alongside it
And the mountains that slide past each other
Like the flat panels of stage scenery
And the theatrical effects of light in the gathering storm
A domelike wave of many-colored fluid
And the salt marsh its mingled scent
Of tomb gas and primitive placenta
His majesty the sun his glorious rising and retiring
Her majesty the moon changeable serene enigmatic