Consent?

        "What use to learn the lessons taught by time
        if a star at any time might tell us: Now."
                        Howard Nemerov in "The Consent"


        If a star at anytime might tell us Now
        as stars have done the leaves and have done you,
        a great among the century's great bards,
        what use indeed have we to learn the lessons
        taught by time—except that we have learned,
        from Yeats and Frost and You, of Poetry,
        at once a valued lesson learned and guarded
        well against the stars and their morés.

        Nothing has been for nothing, Laureate:
        your students cannot wander in a meadow
        without wond‘ring after amateurs 
        cannot view a man and dog walking
        without a sense of partnership  a mud
        turtle without the bending grass  a jet
        descending over the Lady in the Harbor
        without a sense of you there in her torch.

        We try today, as you had done, to notice
        the awesome things that matter least to some
        and most to poets, and record the cycles
        of those stars in their reversed abyss 
        and we wonder at the easy pace
        with which we all step out toward that Now,
        and hope, in some perversion of the truth,
        they have no certain target specified.



        Amœba

        Something about the cosmos comes to mind,
        something tragic, something without end: 
        something about amœba growing larger
        flailing through the ages into fish
        crawling onto land and growing legs
        fur and feathers, hands and claws and wings
        skin, black white brown yellow red and hair
        then building gods, inventing them and kneeling
        to their Names and to their Sons and killing
        others in the name of those god-Names
        then begging off responsibility
        because those gods could wash away the sins
        and leave the overgrown amœba clean,
        washed as if its scillia were pure.

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