You see everything from a distance as if it were near;
this is my only complaint: what you imagine
is accurate enough but hardly true.
This goldfinch, for instance, is not a thrush,
although both birds do frequent the feeder.
Oh, lonesome seer of the hillock,
do you not see how active the maids are
in their various bowers?
What can I tell you? Yes, the same old sunflowers
attract your favorite cynosures.
Yes, that glint of yellow is endowed with ancient song.
But now I’m telling you like a voice amidst a crowd
that a knight of faith, a post woman, is listening
from afar as if her life depended on it.
Just as the man at the bar isn’t really sorry
for bumping the waitress, you see things
that are hypothetical in order to sing, in order to live.
Don’t let all the antinomy fool you, that is,
the millennial palaver. It’s so much elliptical tinder.
So much love talk. Do you hear it?
Brother, I’m afraid. This mercy has lasted
way too long, not for the birds, God bless them,
but for us. No genius, of which there is plenty,
convinces me in the valley that nothing is good,
that blue is black, that the thrush is deaf.