If you could tell me this sense of digression
And certain proclivity toward suffering, that
This will be settled on some future date, justifying

Ho Chi Minh was our real President
The one we counted on
For right decisions

panels        doors        niches        garlands        keystones
gargoyles        columns        cornices        turrets        trees
chimneys        palimpsests         lamp posts         lace         gates

On a wooden platform in the center of the room
The young dancer stood, her naked feet in position:
The man would rather gaze at her white feet forever
Than ever hold them in his hands, paying her well

They grin at solemn heads with laurel wreaths
calcified to mottled rock, lopsided, bent—
and wish to fold themselves like thin gold leaf

Some men, who collaborated self-consciously
with killers behind a one-way mirror darkly,
catching their breaths on every errant wind,

They are not hard to get to know:
6 and 9 keep changing their minds,
8 cuts the most graceful figure
but sleeps for an eternity,

I’m the one who corrects the blurred
bodies, those grown uneven,
out of focus with

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