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Page 4

A blank sheet: if we must designate it
by choice of bedding (sheet), why not choose
the natural bedfellow -- a blank blanket;
both words deriving from blanc (white) and
that from a Germanic word meaning "shining."

With snow we get it right: Snow "blankets
the earth." And our shining virtue
"blankety-blanks" from view the nasty words.

What shines is blank. To shine, be empty,
be light, in which the ampleness of things
(apples, babies, cabbages and the rest
of the alphabet) are beheld, their solid colors
made up of spots of shine and, mostly,
empty spaces.

Again, DOWN, damned thought! Pause here,
where things are things. Leave photons
(wave or particle?) and gaps between atoms
to physics. Enough that I can, with a blink,
blank out the visual world,

perchance to dream another; my own blankness,
like any other, a magnet for things,
an excuse for obsessive creation.

Nature and poetry abhor vacuum. Vacuum sucks,
or rather, suucks! That double U (not W),
you and you, so rare a combination
in our language, you and you together
in the belly of nothing, or rolled up
in a blanket, together, shining.

Note: Re "suucks" – siiiic. (i.e., sic.)

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