Amerika

She has a poetry
Of her own
Carried along
Like a handhold bag
Puffing out a fragrance
Of many interactions
Like an old table
Has a patina of
Infinite impacts.

Her shape, curved like
a bass note
Twists like an ancient glyph
Angles like a rune
And is a scatter of fragments
Like a dot-matrix character.
It holds her history,
A sigil of decisions and
Delights, prejudices, conclusions.

This shape, like the squiggles
Smugglers carve in the old pines
Shows a pathway as it feels
In the mind, not a clarity,
Or as Thomas Pynchon would have it,
A pornography
(Which really simply means symbolism,
Which can be merely appearances hiding
The tangle of roots that is complexity).

No old nodding priest
Could moralize
The purity of her shape
Her poetry is not binary
Nor is it definite, just
A wisp like cloud, twisting
on the wind, yet holding forth
Its choices and reasons
As long as it can against
The slow drip of time.

Tags: fiction, wildlife