SIMPLICITY

A. F. Moritz

Once the simplicity of my songs was their meaninglessness
satisfied with what they found, a shred of greenery
that shrouded our house and a larger shred that shrouded
the khaki creek, dark placid with unease, sparkling
of leaf death and offal, a mirror clearer than fresh days,
deeper than a cloudless night its never breaking and
never speaking surface. What else then were my yips
but acceptable amid sparrow chatter and the invisibles chiming,
crickets and cicadas, and the stir, the snaps, the blunders
of big grasshoppers, poplar-leaf-netherside in hue:
sounds of their legs releasing a stalk, that wags now, wild
grass or wheat, and then their claws catching another,
or the flight of one who fell, click, after which we'd find him
impassive, on a stone let's say or bald patch of baked field,
staring wisely, as if the journey had gone just as long planned.
So it's possible to know too much: for instance, now, that dying
was that place I woke to as life. So my first, simplest
songs, a child's shouts, nothing but life, soaked,
buried and smothered in life, lost in life's thorax,
were wrong. So my tongue was molded by an already old
community of disease and the glories of my eyes were a late
remnant, lute remnant, the feminine lusciousness
and green ray were a greyed-over rind of what had been
before I was formed, a phlegm spit up of the true,
the dead splendor that no one now alive could ever grasp:
our splendor was its corpse
and I had to go forward into the almost birdless treeless
town we had built by cannibalizing the hardened blocks
  of aftermath,
there to fight to live, even live well, as some did,
and fight to take away their words, steal them, deform,
make them my own, stones made adequate
to crumble and tower the song of gratitude that is still enjoined.