CANTO 18 Why is the visionary

 

Why is the visionary Gleem a toothpaste?

Why canna song no come, mum? Who got the key?
Who shut me in here? Why do my eyes bat back

hard sharp pics that clatter in flat stacks?

How come today’s smells suck down a black well?

Where stop the uninterrupted stream?

How deal with the sinking mood?

Form no program,

map no chart, let the cold draft chill the feet.

Halting the song wants to sing.

Pitifully the scraps fit and start.

Almost at random, but not altogether so.

Not even slightly so. How it goes, nobody knows.

Is it circling, centering, swinging

around a sink of uncertainty? No measures

can measure it, it being this urge to sing.

Slap up my lip that would let slip a sloppy

rhapsody about this sleazy woodsy tent, ahent.

Not to transcend, not to bend the long white bar

or slice the quicksand with a singing hack-saw?

Instead words like angry gnats nip away

at the old gray mood, desuetude, deadbolts

of lost lightning frying in a see-song panfish:

Bring me no gruel of woodsy

chipmunk chitchat,

hawk me up no beak ajar

with keen-edged cry:

hunger hunger hunger,

jangle me no jay’s grubby

jejune tune.

It sings because it wants to sing.

Let it bubble. Simmer. Percolate. Incubate.

Let it out. Let it all hang out. Let the

hopeless mulish muttering crest to a bellow

that batters back and forth inside the blank tight drum

of this gaunt hollow god that belches selfishness.