God, but one wearies of flipping them,
of turning them, or punching or,
with certain rheostatted switches, sliding them.
Nipples on the walls’ flat chests,
they yield the milk of light—the creamy
incandescence of resistant tungsten,
and lo-fat fluorescence that comes
in brimming, humming tubes. A modern
miracle, okay; but miracles wear
over a man’s or woman’s lifetime
into mere routines, into minor details
that acquire no-meaning’s muffled sense
of a gap between purpose and sign
like the gap inside a careful package
stuffed with newspapers wadded into nonsense,
the language they were printed in no matter.