Draft 15: Little

More than that is hard to say.
I am drawing a blank.

High clouds, their errancy, ply over ply,
            float.
            And still
I float on eddies in a rocking enormity.

Not mourning, not pleasure,
but auras of evanescence,
and nickname-painted train stops,
and jerry-built victrolas,
canoes pulling away sloppily from simple docks
dribble and bonk of paddle,
a particular grab of grasses,
hairy stems of weeds,
and the afikomen so well hidden
plus misunderstood
it was never teased forth.
Never then redeemed.

So I saw what I saw,
like photographs of the war,
stripes under wire,
shadows scummed or smudged on pavement,
and starved locked rows.

Some clocks stopped but not
other clocks, tick and tock and
I was part of all that it,
a lucky nothing
not in the way of particular harm,
half witness half witless
            dot--a little
            yod or yid
amid the clamors of dawn,
waking inside the whiteness,
before anything is given-----
that is, taken.

To this magic table
spread with glistening nap,
a place like a fairy tale: dolorous and lyric,
"un couvert" where the bread is perfect,
dishes, bodies, fruit piled,
cute mugs caffeine-coated,
wine in dregs and lees,
and salty bowls of weeds,

there is someone, step, step:
over the bridge, down the field,
under the fence, through the door,
and speaks.

The order is "Take cover!"
And hands to necks
the cowering shapes
wedge under desks
puppets of puppets.

Wherein at play
the smallest chancy jot of scratched substance
bounces along a pebbly day.

Recently I lost my watch
dropped straight down off my wrist
and fell into a hole so far it wasn't there.
Strange,
that litmus wristlet π
had covered my nakedness
and now I was exposed.
Or dreamed I'd "missed my stop."

From that point, those points, on,
the trace or shard, the thing
come passing darkly cross me
in the tunnel dirt of time
was mine.

Not hero, not polis, not story, but it.
            It multiplied.
            It engulfing.
            It excessive.
"It" like X that marks the spot, that is, the spots,
an ever wily while, a wilderness of hope.
The spot of almost hopeless hope.
Can barely credit it.

Thus my voice is empty, but I speak and sing
only of this.
The undersentences
that rise, tides of sediment, the little
stuff agglutinating in time, debris
            I sing.
            Cano,
cannot not do it so.

In time's deep well,
my shallow heart has flooded.

From the exile woods
on the edge of the edge
a little mite doth blow.
A Mite! I might
have killed such mites and bits
            before
            today
I didn't think

of needing such
a Little Mite,
this dusty road.

May 1992-December 1992