The gardeners gazing through their open shears
Or staring sightless from their wooden ladders
Stand helpless by and dream they cannot lower

Poetry’s “impulse, like electricity, crossing the space, leaves its signature.”
            —W. S. Graham

No wonder that a flash of sparks
Spills out from what I touch—the LaserJet,

Brimming with static shock,
Suspends invisible electron-clouds

Across the laser-paper’s Radiant White
To print “The Windhover”

Electrostatically—
Hopkins’ creation-poem, spelled out

There is a resonance in stone. 
Just put your ear against the grave of one 
You hated because love was difficult to bear.

This is not the place to
 discuss the rain forests
  of Paraguay, or their

Realism means being there, not living some abstract 
life tied up in equity against the possibility of 
tomorrow, all the things we were taught to conserve.

Hopper never painted this, but here
on a snaky path his vision lingers:

Three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces

Before God created people, 
he made animals,
unnamed and marvelous,

Some learned the palette is the devil’s platter,
the brush a crucifix: by law, no icons
no graven images “made unto thee.”

Facing wisteria, his eyesight dim,
Monet painted a footbridge over a pond,
dawn, noon, sundown. Seeing only blue,

Subject and maker shed their names, and here
the Met displays that multinominal picture
on a brochure: self-portrait of the artist,