Why do it? Or is it a real question, if there’s only one answer?
But there’s always more than one answer. To practice
being a houseplant, perhaps. Or to say, look, the room
and I are one. One kind of action
is to walk down the middle of the street. Another
is the interior folds of this flower.
There is no other way to know what might be needed.
And how long do we have? The street, certainly,
will be here. The laws of the twelve tables
hover even now, centuries later, though we don’t say it often,
or maybe ever. And this flower?
It’s already gone or was never here, and will always remain,
the way one interacts with it,
and so who can say what’s necessary?
*
Well, for starters, we eat, we sleep. If we’re going to know it,
we’re going to know it this way. It feels like a trick
sometimes, how we start and then start again.
Wasn’t there a ribbon? Didn’t we cross
without looking back, as we were taught?
And now, each time we look, the question is the same question.
To say the landscape is paint, and finished,
but changed and changed again.
There’s a kind of reticence to it, too.
One must say, “I’m telling you the truth when I say this,”
though it’s just appeared from nowhere.
The end doesn’t matter, as it’s not here yet.
The flower is brand new, and yellow.
The street is filling with people.