After a Week in Chartres
Become absorbed into ideas about how a house is really a boat
Which is stopped
And a car is a boat
Which is limited and heartbroken,
Separated from sea
And you will begin to want the house and the boat
Which both break rules of how a house or a boat should be.
Can you not be childish and be a grownup? Yes, you can.
You can eat pan and pain and butter and fromage and apricot jams.
You can walk till your legs are both muscled and weary. Your smile
May be dependent upon knowing many things unbuyable are
Missing
And will probably never be found again. They are like land
You cannot reach because the sea is too big and pretty and hungry
And too in love with its reflective capabilities, its dance eternal
With the sun.
What has the sun always been to you? The middle fiddle of the blender,
The machine which whirls us all into submission, acquiescence, glitter,
Says our physical wounds will heal and our brains will rise above, our
Novels about loneliness are nothing compared to the loneliness of planets
Who are soothed only by gravitational pulls, felt like tugs of the sea, in
The sky, the gorgeous sky like a shell full of mother-of-pearl cascading
Into a show of colors, glitters, lives. The math! The math breaks itself
Down into the lining of blankets, their silken bindings.