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Page 211

Ah! That new-page scent! Someone should market it.
We could spray our old letter-littered literature with it.
Grandpa's brittle yellowing leather-bound Harvard Classics –
just brush off the attic cobwebs, one shpritz of Newscents, and,
ahhh! -- a spring morning in the Rockies.

Leather-bound -- a curious concept: "Hey,
why don't we pulp some trees into flat, white flakes,
then fasten them between pieces of cow skin?
How do we come up with such things?
It's not the first thing I'd think of,
watching a bulky beast (say, a Guernsey,
brown with white spots, high, squared-off rear,
belly and its equipage swaying as it moves,
big gentle eyes, flicking tail) grazing in a field;
far off the blue haze of horizon trees: Let's see,
if we peeled the skin off that creature, and cut it
into little rectangles and glued flakes of those trees
to it...

On the other hand, we are all skin-bound,
we bags of significance and wind. (Scramble
"similes" to get "missile". I shoot one
into the air, it falls to earth, some poor cow
knows where.) And some of my most savage critics
are hidebound: "Why do you trivialize your poems
with silly parenthetical interjections and godawful puns?"
(Why is "godawful' worse than "awful? How odd
that God has become an intensifier, The Infinite
as spice.)

But sometimes we are free of our skin or at least
unbounded by it. And words escape with us.
You and I are the means by which words
escape the page and even the brain. We are the
prison laundry trucks. Hidden in baskets heaped with
old worn-out forms, dangerous living words are loaded into us,
leave with us, ride past the unsuspecting critics, editors
and even the most rigorous of scholars,
leap from us, run free.

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