confessional poetry

THE INTELLECTUAL. One time – it is but once a year - if the sky is rosy and the dawn is fresh
(Fresh a fool’s confessor, you know) I take my fortune down a cane’s white side so early
To church. If the day is washed in bantered clime, and the belfry’s swallow-light a pale cream,
I make my coffee better light brown. Cast my bell-dove shadow to that far way out-of-world (a tie so ordinary).
But after so recanting, all I really want to see is
That hat (well it is Mrs. McCreeley's hat), stolid flat straw waving feathers since
the coffee was a water-taste, no cream. Same I sit in Edge-of-world to watch
The flouncing warbled colors from the curled-past headpiece, the crown, the coronation -
Not a thing begins, the hymns fill out in voices all ambrosial, and I don't have a single
philosophical thought about millinery. The pink ruffles and ruffled swan's-down rise up.
Sole occurrence, a feat: Every so often, I smile when she asks me, "So do you like this new

PASTOR?" So in that moment watch his only secret: does the hymnal book run old enough
For the seashells in the window and the bulrushed half-light yellow on the tea-breath panes?
Saints it is too much – a touch so hushed - and yet no one understands; butterfly and sandy rain, and one moment
If the strand is washing, the salty seagrass squalling, shore in lather halving the screen,
That I cannot turn the cross-shed waterwheel has more to hand than Scripture, lo the white-yellow half-light,
faintly old in grey of rain, swept still, bandied, webbed and twain, feels as a page does: brittle.
I am that vesper with no words - all my thoughts are out of Same - but a sermon salient follows my lips.
In the moment over, anyway, when the waterwheel did not turn, sentences were willow-leaves to understand

IT. The same weather full of jasper inkling shells clatters ‘cross the shore; the in-tide scampers tiny vestries.
They say naught, only the maker’s most: “Whirled half-a-way, tript Sunday, verity: a-brightly sail-made
With the sky in blue galoshes, tomorrow.” The shells scamper and the bath waits. Meanwhile present a

THEATRICAL. Low the fallow curtain, the characters present their vines: caricatures that fall to the trapeze.
Before the wide-brimmed hat existed there was something I don't know in the middle of laughter.
Sole as their players, they are so much with such consistency that I cannot think to say
A single thing that that known

COMPANY had said, "But it's so soaring lovely,
You never knew it like I did." Surely the good

SCHOLAR could tell us what it is. But he is safe in somewhere, and he drinks his coffee light brown
Because he will not tell the chairman "I have taken to the church,"
As he would never tell some blue galoshes that a sky was wrapping round them, ten past three.
(Not like he would know it, even. Will doubles a happening: he has not been a child these past five half-minutes.)
But that hat is such a relic, he thinks. It is so juvenile, yet the flounces, yet the stares - it is practically

VICTORIAN, really. And things, he thinks, are best looked at by the trials, in the one sole right proportion,
For distance seems too horrible, examination – terrifying. In the small grass, caterpillars, the Antipodes
Make up the illumination aria. Digressing say, “His letters are so elegant, he cannot think to talk about them,”
Until all the swirls go rambling out to be but
typewriter-keys on hat-racks, catching themselves on the rickety vines
Midst that truth of the universe spiraling down: hats box themselves once in a minute,
Just a half-minute quarter past three, store-close whirligig, sometimes with those stoic ribbons grabbing -
The truth does give his letters precision; but then it could always go back to that

INTELLECTUAL, who is ashamed of having one philosophical thought
about
millinery.