Classic Poem

Great wheels.
Better step back.
Like standing next to a pyramid.

Scale.

Not much used
yet mighty.
" On the scale of my life, "
a thought,
as if I had heard
a voice.
Instantly
the elements slip into place:
my house, the rocks, the ocean.
Is this their night orbit?
This is not where they were.

Country road
under the headlights
speeding, beautiful,
glances off my cheek,
an abstract flow.

Burrr . The tires,
as from a Scot glottis.
Gurgling then
but soft and long,
unrolling,
rubber slapping softly
against the cement,
the driver's foot asleep.

Dark bus body.
Night, the ursprache .
Gold out of quiet
light around him.
No, it is more delicate,
more like an emanation
a man
alone
longing.
Of my eyes
yet outside,
a cousin to the strange,
the lovely Elizabethan line,
" We have the receipt of fern-seed,
we walk invisible. "

But voices intervene:
" I get antsy. I have to stretch my legs,
get out into a trout stream. "

Deeply comforting, the ordinary,
but I contract into a cricket's pulse
and have to travel through my medium
on a higher frequency.

Night.
Where am I?
In a dense Bartokian wood
sans entropy,
tactile with frogs,
conceivably a negative of space,
yet starts felicity.
Here am I absolutely tuned.
Call Titania to my side
for Leah can not follow me here.

Here sometimes there is no way in
except by some other poet's bungling.
Then I cry out,
" Not that way, this way! "
and I find myself in the wood again
and all is well

Then an old voice
as from a balcony,
a lady,
sweet:
" Mother always impressed on us
that never was a long time, "
referring to her own rebeliousness,
and she ought at least to try.

The way of the world:
the old are wise,
the young think they know.
This is her magic wood.
I must not mock it.

Then another:
" I gotta go back
and look under a leaf
like when I was a kid to see
if I'm really a sensitive loner
or just an image. "

Intellectual. Laughs
I refuse to look pleased
or contend with his intellect.
All I want is to reach out
and touch his hand.

Who is that staring at me?
Cold eye of a pragmatist,
my ancient enemy.
Well, if a dog in time
can look like its master,
why not the eyes of a pragmatist,
from always fixing on a practical object,
come to look that hard?

But lutes hang in the air
unplayed.
The poet plots an axis
in space
and Leah becomes my polestar.