Jean Day
from Enthusiasm

 

 
Three Romantic Fragments
 
 

 

a miraculous branch? So, my friend, into a hubbub

the prolapse of waiting for a reason to come
clear. Buffalo Bill put his money on Laugh Cream,
The Great Lung Healer; for us it's all one
big bucket of, dare I say-I don't dare say. Alertly
adaptive and widely recursive he reaches
his imported hand out to canvas the once-mountain stream for what it
was, a stanzaic meditation on making do. So
with a soda in the other and a way of "singing
in his own head," Bill met me recovering
from the strange and wonderful history

 

nothing stands still to witness. A process with no necessary end

exiled in the sun. Got up, felt dubious
in the tedious accumulation of nothing important
nothing bungling nothing erratic and I sometimes hoped
as they say in the sea
for a volcanic eruption of gorgeous arrows flying
from a string of once and for all gentle thoughts
Was anyone ever actually "handsome in triumph"?
For the sand in domestic jars
can't be counted and the future tense
refers to nothing outside the present. The free agent

 

smokes. We picks up where I left off

in every matter, measure. But you are full of it
matter, I mean. "Water, upon which waves, upon
which a bundle of sensitive particles, woman or
ventrical through which the spectacle of a capital Man rocks the touch
of the free radical at a hard
time." Yet it is not so co-eternal with you
this most ridiculous structure
fallen on latex and line
this the case is (she or he)
who always stands where a beginning was