Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping

Who pays attention to syntax

will never understand. 

Who pays attention to the

flutter of the brain? 

No one,  I hope, who lives

in this now town.

Let us go then you and I.

Let us go down for there is space.

Let us go down and confuse.

Let us go down and take away time.

Take away time.  

Will there still be sequences?  

Or only consequences?  

The truth is in New Mexico

and in the pudding.

Let us go then. 

The dewdrops from the eaves

are you and I.  Let us go down

and see if facts by themselves can take fire

and learn Finnish with its twenty-seven

cases, or are there twenty-nine?

Let us pretend.  Let us go down

where evenings meet underneath the sky.

Do you dare eat a peach?  

Take away time and who will drop

a question on your plate? 

Take away space and you are left

to sort through twenty-seven cases

of fruit (or is it twenty-nine?).

If I take your case, my friend,

my fee will be fee fie fo fum. 

I lost my sense of smell after the war.

Which war?  There were so many.

Start with Michael and his arch-

angels on their way back through

the arc de triomphe from Russia

with neither love nor hate nor victory.

Let us go then, you and I.

Let us take that long walk back

across the Paris Chinese border.

Let us go down where there is space

and eaves to drop their dew drops

from the shingles of the world.

                              —Donnell Hunter

                                        8 February 2012