The Left Column
Liberty by
Assumption
  The poet worries that
   if people don't understand those
    poetic and mystic truths
      of life and death
        that they would take those
           solioquies and ranty monolouges
               of poem-character villins
         as the ranty thoughts
            of the un eased mind
               of an out-of-work poet.

    And the poet hasn't had a glass of water yet,
        if people don't understand then
            poetic and mystic ideas
      will haunt them until they do.
      The poet doesn't need to show
         other mystics or poets
    the mystic truths because
      those things stick all around you
    like iron fillings do to a magnet.

  You are the magent.
    You are reading this poem.
   You have that magnetic field
      invisible and unknowable to us here now
       in all of it's intregate detail.

  And the howling winds 
     of the chattering minds
    don't ever cease
      in their taunts or their ryhmes.
   And the Winter, unceasing,
      is never releasing
       the plausible deniability 
      of the holy skeptics (for
            all skeptics
     are truely holy).

   The poet worries
       about his statements of semi-factoid
     that he drips loose like a drip
        of cold water off the house
    of the poet's imaginary
        concoction of poetic truths,
    the lines above, about holy skeptics
      true as a poet is true, so false
     as a poet is false,
   not real but only to say
      that even if wrong
     the doubting Thomas is still holy.
  The Skeptic is still holy
      even when wrong.

  So go ask St. Jack
       If you go to St. J (in vermont)
   will all thoughts of Lowell be vanished?  Vacant?

   There is a zero-occupancy ruling
     about the falling over house,
    the one with the giant icicles
   that hang around the dirt-lot car-lot
  around that abandoned tenement.

  Those swords of doom
      that over hang the menshes junky car
     could slam down
    and crush that old Toyota like a pancake.

  That foriegn idea,
      a buddah in a junky car,
    he takes the skeptic thoughts  
        to  far
   like wreakless driving on 
       an icey, down bending
        Interstate.

   But they treated the road.
    And there, in the abode,
      they made it all well
            but it took him to hell.


  When Jason arrived at the icey wreak
     he skidded to a sudden stop
   and then flagged other vehicles to stop
        to save their lives.

  The poet is like one such as Jason.
    He flags there at the icey bend
   where the wreakless speed with their heavy loads,
    all of the methaphors of
             spiritual truth
   are heavier than the load of a
      semi-truck loaded with hardwood logs.  
    They smash there.
       all of that solid wood
    splinters as it crashes into the icey gorge
    near which, beside which
       they built this highway.

  Maybe they should close that highway
      during such a storm.
   Because you can never treat  the surfaces enough
     in that kind of a storm,
   Where the rain comes  on steady
     and just at the cusp of freezing,
   washing away the treatments of salts
  that might keep the moisture from freezing.

  But in the Spring
     no icicles hang above
  the free dirt lot
    next to the abandoned house.
  No ice builds up on the road
    at the treacherous bend and down grade,
   trucks can race through
        and they do
     with a lot less peril.

  But such weighty things
     can always be a peril
   no matter what the weather.

 


The Vermont Hills
Roll by.  The Connecticuit River
is a Water Gap from Northfield
to Lebanon.