DONALD BRITTON

"Here and Now"

____________________

The start of a new era

Of desperation is starting over.

Meanwhile you and your bronze friend

Run naked through the yellowed broom sage,

Suspended vaporously above life

Like high pressure systems. A redolent

Cascade of voices from the lawn

As the next new hope something will happen

Ascends the orangerie steps, an endless

Unpunctuated sentence that seems at the time

To illuminate everything, as if a giant

Had stepped between you and the sun,

Sucking the light and punching a hole

In space, revealing infinite vistas

Of anticipation and delay.

These things have no beginning, or rather

Were set in motion long before we became

Their facsimile, thinking ourselves privileged

To secret information, not sensible

Of how the world contrives with enormous

Duplication of labor to rid itself of us

And perform its little routines

Solo in the galactic swimming pool

That is at last a total stage. It is

The amusing notion life might someday

Not be confusing that coordinates

Our award-winning sentiments these last days

Of summer, preparatory to the paint-by-number

Rush of autumn, the colors balking

Within their lines, which as a kid

Was the hardest part and apparently still is.

You must do something, though, not caring

What it is, so long as when the day ends,

You’re able to claim that this thing

has been accomplished, brought nearer

The perfection toward which it ludicrously

Aspires, then put aside to be resumed

At a point just over the next rise yonder

Where suddenly pertinent trees now loom.