Arthur Vogelsang

PHYSICS, ETC.
April 25, 2018 Vogelsang Arthur

PHYSICS, ETC.

 

Everything and everybody are always doing something.
At no time on earth are all human beings still.
Or never does the high-quality packaging around your prescription
Stop deteriorating to unusual twists, it’s just slow.
I suppose the rose bush is between the above two
Things or bodies in its activity speed.
I am tired and I want this universal process to stop.

Now I’ve taken a nap and I want it to go
Go go for me and the bush but not for the packaging.
After the nap I don’t want the impossible
Or say what I really think on twitter.
Before the nap, when I’m tired bone and brain,
I let out foolish but absolutely true stuff
And I actually think of it as stuff rather than roses
Or my few dears or plastic.  I am trying to get
Around to something.  Help me if you can.
Write to my home address or my email—
No need for the public to see our coupling.
For instance one of us will think of a solution
To the inevitable process of never-ending movement
Which is that suppose everything was dead.
We are protected from everybody knowing
Which one thought of it and a whole category 5 hurricane
Of wind and water and flying sofas
In our then-breakneck-speeding communication channels.
The flying-sofa-at-our-heart (or our neck) kind of response
From 874 strangers that would shut us up (and hurt the most)
Would be that everybody and everything
Are never doing anything
And it’s our fault.

 

Arthur Vogelsang‘s seven books of poetry include A Planet (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983) and Orbit (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).  Twentieth Century Women (University of Georgia Press, 1988) was chosen by John Ashbery for the Contemporary Poetry Series.