Unfollowed Figment

Useless lighthouse, and the bucket on the beach, the tattered begonias
Forget examples—there’s not an entity or detail around that isn’t more than a mere example
What’s truly funny?
Once upon a time there was a mouse, and there was a cactus and a pair of very small rubber
   boots with a hole in the sole of the left one, and now that I think back I remember that there
   was a baby on a barge in a lake full of flowers, and out of these there’s a story to weave
   and probably more than one
The music changes at the mantel, the bassoonist is baffled, the synchronizer fails
Rickety marble, wet wood, the road narrowing into the distance and then turning around a rock
Is it empty good writing, is it research, resurgence, repartee?
8, 9, 10, 11, minus 31, 8
A stranger creates an occasion
Lewd silver sea, your bigness carries barges as noon stands in grass
See, I got cops—or they got me; so says the melancholy memoirist from the anarchy of her
   dreams
Clear is the sojourn
In the stiff air, down the unbalanced wind, over dusty culverts, women bear their hot cells of
   benevolence
Are all wonders small?

Copyright © 2013 by Lyn Hejinian. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on June 3, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.