To Stabilize, It’s Buttercups
& the plucky boy, who
escapes his nanny as
he walks toward me triumphantly wielding a stick-sword
to proclaim “monsters aren’t real!”
Steady, I say to myself (self, not a stable thing)
then more inwardly, darling, there are real monsters.
I’ve been reading William Blake
who made Hell the made-thing we make the world
& in a burst of rhapsodic power the boy
turns with a bigger stick
“Don’t forget,”—he lectures—
“monsters are in the imagination!”
His nanny summons. But his urge
for self-mastery—luminous & crackling—
persuades me again in this city, my city,
we are the luckiest—
gush of Streisand—luckiest people in the world.
My inner-punchline is always people:
I can’t sleep because of people
because I am people
because I disobey
my own rule of not drinking
red wine past 10 pm,
which makes me shaky &
unable to recall Blake’s lines.
There are poisonous people
& in an obsessive stalemate one can become
monstrous or worn to a pencil nub.
But the boy brings luck & William Blake’s
prophetic presence:
Eternity is in love with the productions of time—
(there’s the line!). Eternity—
not just a Romantic but a true lover
smitten with our life-in-time
& with this boy, who is not an indentured
worker or little chimney sweep—Eternity,
in love with the mockingbird,
that grey ventriloquist
running its routine, singing as if with joy,
near the park bathrooms.
