Sufficient wildness
The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses
like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period. Thoreau
A nickel each—
the spending
kind—time love
needed rope
or explosives to
sprout—bloom,
blossom, whatever
stage we stop
to note how bodies
wring or erupt
into colors—
and I’d be rich.
The beholder,
I know. I confess
a despotic eye,
a tyrannical initial
disposition.
Who couldn’t guess
that, though?
It’s not news,
to say the passions
ascend/descend
the throne of
every fiefdom.
News me about
the fief.
Wednesday last
I read in Walden:
“The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.”
My wife and I
argued, our regular,
scheduled domestic
disturbance
to fix the terms
of home
and art repair.
Not exactly Peter
robbing Paul,
but same synagogue.
The dogs
dug under
and escaped the fence.
We concluded
that like trees
our virtues, if any,
were in being
unable to be
otherwise: but
a thief, too, must
be sheltered.
That love is
a daemon or backyard
grass will
never revive, I
can easily accept.
If it resists turning
to gold, old
chemists and I
agree it’s devilish.
But wrath—as
in wrath of Woden
or Odin’s wrath,
like copper-wire
wreaths, or coils,
as a service, hired
and performed—
works only in north
countries; love
there goes for what
maims you; I skip
the God term
on purpose.
What I plant
every year, manure
but never water
never fails, as yet,
to yield.