proteanme

Yep. Poetry. It is amazing. And right now Roger Mitchell is hitting the sweet spot. Also, it makes me happy that he taught in southern Indiana for a big chunk of his career, because then I can pretend to have a secret kinship with him.

Beneath A Cloud

So much of it is or seems (who knows the difference?)
transplanted, uprooted, dangling, frittered.
I like invisible, though visible
has its properties, proprieties, its strange
amazements. I’m equal to the bees, let’s say,
transparent, bespattered, rearranged, though not
without being first arranged. How or by what,
I don’t ask. Gathered, scattered, secret. Here
for a moment. In terrible, terrifying,
ordinary distance from matter and things,
from reasons I can’t see the reason for.
Lucid and fluid. I look out the window.
Do things in stages, leave them unfinished,
believing that nothing ever becomes
completely. Is always coming about, around.
Sometimes remembered. Remembered again,
but fragmentarily, or by someone else.
Ancient, delirious, wise, unable.
Shouted across a field. Fallow, hollow,
hallowed. Done in the dark, all of it. At dawn,
on a Tuesday or Friday. All of it
always arriving. Convinced, confused. Knowing
and unknowing. A cloud beneath a cloud.
A sky bringing all of itself along.

-Roger Mitchell