18 July 2004. The following are all the Poem poems I've done so far this year. Just four, but I haven't done that many in a year for the past few years, I don't think. Note that I've included the one from yesterday. That's because I've changed it slightly. "Poem's Patience Rewarded" is also here again. For a while I had it climax in "the th," but now believe (permanently!) that "the hte" is better--"the" not yet organized rather than "the" just forming, smoothly. Next, perhaps, "the ht."br>

Versions of my other two poems have been here before, but I've revised them. I'm not sure I've finished with them, but they seem done to me right now.

                    Poem as Pythagorus, Almost

                    Somewhere in his thoughts' unfiled rain,
                    far from the city encumbering him,
                    Poem is absorbed with whether or not
                    there is a name in long division
                    for the product of the divisor                    
                    and sunlight.

                    Beyond the dividend, beyond how, he remembers:

                                          spring is.

                    Among honeybees five places beyond his ambitions' 
                    final decimal point, he strides now--a Pythagorus almost.
                    Definitely no minion or administrator,
                    who adroitly evades any drowse toward 
                    the untaught sunlight,
                    the formaldehyde on low, the moon
                    unlawfully naming
                    stones and stones and stones
                    into audible
                    affirmations.

                    Poem understands without.

                    He understands where random dapplings
                    release Civilization,
                    its lamentation never his,
                    regardless of the sun's owner, the sun's ownership.



                    Criticism's Origins

                    Back when Poem was mostly feathers,
                    Criticism inter-branched darkly under him. 
                    Where he'd come from is uncertain;
                    it's possible he'd been there from the beginning.

                    As Poem slowly tightened into vocality,
                    Criticism mastered himself calibrated
                    along the soar and ensign
                    of his iron.

                    Alwaysed thereafter in the undersurge
                    of Poem's vocation, he spryed directions
                    through it lethal with concords
                    macro-celestially beyond
                    the crinch of the minders
                    between poets and fame.

                    And Poem, ruled unawares
                    by the beat and thrust
                    of those directions,
                    struggled his wordings ultimately
                    into re-knowings
                    not even the loudest art-as-handmaid-of-autocracy
                    could studge anyone nimbled at all
                    from divining,
                    induteously.



                    Poem, Again in Descent

                    Poem pedaled down the street, unconscious
                    of its weary palomino in and out of oak-shadows
                    as it descended to the sea.

                    When an aisle off it winced into place, 
                    he followed it toward the hints of a mood 
                    he thought he saw at the end of it.

                    There, on a sidewalk carousing out of all
                    San Diego continued to mean into 
                    him, he noticed a skirt being raised.

                    Dark laws were spilling out of it.
                    Unable to respond to them, he blended
                    morosely into the oak-shadows, 
                    then into the sea.



                    Poem's Patience Rewarded

                    Poem spent months on the dump
                    studying the the.
                    He knew that poetry
                    can't permanently stop growing,
                    even in the starkest 
                    wand's winter of our finest poet
                    of ultimate stillnesses,
                    but where, he wondered, was even 
                    the smallest flicker of anywhere further
                    in the absolute black 
                    just beyond the the?

                    Yet, as he wondered and wondered, 
                    he wore slowly down
                    to the edge of his voice, then at last
                    into something long-lost
                    that was more primary than voice,
                    and there in a black 
                    somehow increased 
                    from the black
                    it had been before, 
                    he began to make out
                    hints of the hte.