Just This

It came to me
suddenly —
Three Dog Night
were really great!
And the revelation
engendered a seizure
that revealed
the ephemereality
of eternity:
how Theseus in the labyrinth
is everyone’s predicament,
how the milk of three ornery daughters
spawned irony,
and how every morning
trails clouds of glory.
But it was after midnight
that things got interesting
in the low-ceilinged kitchen,
with the slop sink sweating,
and the door to the back garden open,
and us the only ones on the block
still awake.
The next day
a powerful wind
whipped through Yankee Stadium —
I saw it happen on television —
and eight minutes later
it arrived in Brooklyn
to disturb the birds
nesting in the air conditioner:
proof that everything
is always beginning and becoming.
To bring it into being
means always deploying.
Because the portal
to the river of cordial
closed in 1960,
reducing me
and all who came after me
to a cowboy vulgarity,
to fluidity
on a wave of dissipation,
but thus a deeper appreciation
for the play of changing
light and shadow
on a window fan on a rainy day,
and the certainty
that the light we imagine we see
with eyes half closed, squinting into trees,
is the most beautiful anyone’s ever seen.
Like three weeks in Andalusia,
it ameliorates.

I believe I should like
to decorate your life
with a painted scale model
of the Apollo 11 lunar module,
and then bow out
in a blaze of italics,
anxious for exit,
yet anxious to persist.
And so I’ll go
erase the notes for this poem,
so that you’ll believe
it came to me
on its own
as just this.