The Spirit That Speaks

Psychologists noted) had ever despaired

Although a few had to be artists and speak

Of subtleties that embarrassed the unimproved

Eye. Yet everyone agreed even they

Were honest sorts, content to display their illuminations

On walls, content to lap up the world like so many

Warm-tongued cats. Mom smiled, Dad winked, the

camera

Whose omnipotence the reviewers found "refreshing"

blinked.

"THE SPIRIT THAT SPEAKS"

The spirit that speaks in the iris

Exclaiming at length a poise of blossom

Is not spirit but laborious congruence,

A stiff dance, the shy shopgirl

Falling in love with a handsome stranger.

A credulous event, too minute

To represent that reductive will invoked

By unnerved lecturers; an enterprise not an answer,

With no goal unless repetition were a goal,

Feet moving because they were feet,

Possibility like a child leery of water

Waddling eon-slow towards the edge

Of the pond of being. Remove the iris and the world

Goes, a Zeppelin ripped and plummeting,

All the industrious captains staring out

The widening portholes, wondering for the first time,

As birds and baggage fly by, if

Existence is, after all, a passive tumult,

An unprincipled verb, a blindman's certainty.

All this, and more, is what the iris would not tell me.