CANTO 71 Look for wires

 

Look for wires that lay down circuits of their own,

Barnum and baling wire to jerry-rig the mind’s

contraption, or jury-rig a flivver legal in all states

including comatose, invulnerable to criticism.

Let all the tics and spastics

trip off the phrasemongering tongue—the trouble is

to trick out what is fresh, garbed

not merely in a groatsworth

of wit, but robed in some poundage of insight.

Beneath, above, and between such crumbs of fancy or plain,

like coffee soaking into the cruller, there should be an infusion

of something far deeper than agility, a Wordsworth

of whatchamacallits.

Thus by plain ensample put into practice

the tricky art, deft and daft, eftsooner than later,

apt, clipped, robust riposte, light-lipped and limber,

legerdemain and de women, virtu engendred so:

 

Let the screed fry in the apple-pan dowdy

and let hang-dog expressions bark up

the trivial hirsute of happiness.

Look at the hair-shirt with its tails out

that wag the Doberman’s pinched look

before you leap intuitively to the wrong concussion.

Landing head-first may jar the Leyden

while the gentians crackle in the back room

at Kirillian jokes as the aura grows late.

The moon in a wrong phrase took a crater

writing course, glowing orbiter dictums

filling old gray Mares with bloated ballets.

Here’s the one-night stanza where verse-similitude

doubled for truth that had to be drug out—

a pentothal poem, que serum, sirrah:

Rain leaks from the old

gutter—waterfall so close;

mourning dove, so far.