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poem for after the spring equinox 2025

 The Grand Minima

(7 x 6)

for William Empson

 

Totting it up a plethora of minuscule

debris fields, eon by inch,

the daily granular fractures,

chipped bits and bobs,

dust bunnies that don’t ever quit,

the towering trivial pizza box

style of personal architecture –

 

love lies, business crops wilt, soar,

the whole a broken abacus possessed

by a stammering Ouija board

whose misspelt detritus inspires

poetry in the super-rich or bored,

the rising tide lifts all quotes, all toffs

step off yachts to sleep between sheets

 

when the port appears like a murdered

ghost – we host what we love most,

we live in a blackhole inside a blackhole,

like mice are denizens of a tinier Manhattan

project, the nuclearism is unclear, but here

it goes, small into smaller, like faller into fall or

inside the deep dive is the pool looping

 

around its Ouroboros dream of self –

we’re colliding with the sun that grows us,

as dancers swoon by starlight to the violins

that thrill with their spheres – musical

dividends, paying down, paying off,

jots and crosses, forgotten knots,

those broken rubber bands

 

good for nothing but snaking

about the lone chopstick, pennies

from Victor Von Doom’s homeland,

the whirligig pirouettes until it stops,

and we, who once were real, are legends

now for agents, booklet faces

left folded on the pews after the mourning,

 

some anecdotes might-as-well-be

Medieval, or, molecular iotas,

light liquified into cold solids, crazy

salad days browning definitively…

the rays that once were high as corn

now slowing down, so the small ice age

will waltz with rivers, on the planetary stage.

 

March 21, 2025

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