Some of the poets have discovered
that we are anxious to disconnect
the dots and words, to invoke
speech's possible ramble
coming in, awash and surrounding
like a tide, like a tide
of dead leaves whispering
our autumnal contingencies.
And true, the clichés abound,
exposing our non-being
and the certain emptiness of death,
the passivity needed to survive
the modern by luxuriant asides.
And yet love's obliquity
is still a language,
a tutoring mastery of desires
and hurts, leaps and kneelings
at the utterance of a name.
1: By Michael Heller (2003)
