APPROACHING THE ARGUMENT
Persistent as the
flyswatter,
already two wasps have
fallen;
Sunday promises to be a
three-wasp day.
The Protestant bells knell
extolling the piety that is
Amsterdam,
and Cartesian logic of
canals below sea-level:
who can outmaneuver the
sand?
End of summer—the radiant
enigma
of sun-warmed bricks
yielding
to the icy vault of kitchen
windows
still raises apparitions of
endless hunger
droning toward our morning's
commerce.
With the ceaseless clerical
dance peculiar to wasps,
they bless unlikely converts:
the empty yellow cup,
the slender black
supplications of my pen
on the familiar altar of
paper.
Voraciously they worship
stale food odors
with the same dogged zeal I
tried to define love—
making such a nuisance of
themselves,
the only alternative is a
quick and simple death.
At first we tried to warn
them; now we too
are indifferent to the
tender compound equation
of a glass prison against
the pane,
and the sudden freedom into
open air.
Escape is temporary; they
return,
and each according to the
laws of nature,
we respond, sacrificing our
daily wasps—
the flotsam of small corpses
in an encroaching sea
of stinging words.
6 Sept. 1992
Amsterdam
2001 Fourteen Hills
1993 Green Fuse
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