From LUCRETIUS AND THE LOGIC OF VENUS

A poem by V.B. Price

Most all of us
have lives that are
like a history of breezes
moving through the leaves.
They happened.
Some of us wrote poems, some
read charred papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum,
some tortured patriotically,
some were wispy and tough and played the viola,
others lectured, were soldiers,
changed diapers, cooked supper,
drew truth with pencils,
some cared for the aged and tried
to learn the piano, others invented
bombs that could atomize millions,
some planted trees as an act of conscience,
some washed crude oil from gulls,
some taught workers how to read,
and most did more with their lives
than they thought they could.
The breezes show us to be
a little more than nothing,
each of us, no matter how
important the things we do.
The human forest.
A junk store of stems and twigs.
But we see ourselves
as spacious views
which seem so green, so safe,
so comforting with shade
but which we know
to be quite different
from the vantage point of our
peripheral
insider recollection — a wood pile,
a failed garden,
tools stacked like sculpture,
deep islands of green, a grove,
a copse of quince, woods and thickets,
a stand of elms and the occult
protection of arboring cool shadows
stretching out
for the thousands of days most of us live,
if chance is our Mentor
and loads the dice.
All of this was seen and known
by a connoisseur of clouds
on a day as grim and bleak and lonely
as losing your lover to a bear
and just escaping with half your scalp,
a day made of cold gray walls slick
as slobber, a day so hard to move
even its flimsy edges won’t curl up, but even then
breezes through the trees
and discrepancies between
what you know
and what you see
found their way
through the freezing solitaire
to warm a smooth far corner
of the mind where joy and fault
grow perfectly together,
a braiding of the real
and the random told to us
like perishing shimmers
woven on a wall,
our lives themselves
charred scraps
with jottings
left behind, brittle
as old leaves snagged
on grapevines
in the early spring.