1.
They bear the energy over, while
all carry on underneath—
all the moving parts, the subtle intrigues—
without the lines, no heat, no force:
(Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.)
Where does it come from, this authority? What spark
(…who made thee? Dost thou know who…)
lights, and how it ignites, like magic
…spirit and process…
(What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.)
2.
Of magnetism, dynamism, (witchery?):
(Come live with me, and be my love)
Too, mystery:
mastery, my story, messy missing madnessy
(heaven must be missing an angel)
Cut
the lines become
masquerades, or they mask themselves so
(You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows)
or do you?
3.
There is only one path to one place,
and it runs
beneath these (Danger!) lines.
You may read between them;
you may color inside them;
you may love in spite of them;
but you need them, and when they won’t come
you are left in the dark.
***Credit? In order, Wallace Stevens; William Blake; Don Pearce & Frank Pierson; Christopher Marlowe; (every imaginationless bar hawk, ever, and) Freddie Perren & Keni St. Lewis; Bob Dylan…
***
This poem is the eleventh in my marathon of poems (plus 3.8) for Tupelo Press’s cool fundraising project 30/30. You can view the poems I and the other “runners” submit every day during the month of March, at
http://tupelopress.wordpress.com/3030-project/.
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