Soon, of course, you have to
pee.
In the great mutual embrace
that is always happening
Between that which is eternal and that which dies,
Between essence and accident, there are accidents.
On a campus deflowered but
risen fresh in summer rapture,
You run, then cramp, and walk, and try to run again,
But cannot. A Catch-22: the faster you move
The greater the likelihood
you will prove the warmth
And wetness of your mortality; the slower you walk
The farther in time to a latrine. Past coffee-shop
And art gallery, closed in
the late loaming sulphur
Streetlight; cars spaced at silent intervals as if
The world were nothing but an off-season amusement
Park. An old joke: The chicken
or the road? That
Which we take into our body can never be absented.
There are indivisible sums in the shrubbery
And Britons picking through
bone.
next
poem | poetry index