April 5

Making poetry a person


Goldie



You were the tattered prospector,
heading out with a sieve and a gun,
into the desert hills, searching for nuggets,

finding instead the fountain
of sewage,
streaming slippery shit down the mountainside.

Still you kept climbing, slipping unstoppable,
scrambling to the top where, steady at last,
you dried to granite

and time passed.
And your name became The Watcher.
And still I wanted to join you,

to become the witness, the one who separates
sensation from stimulus
delight from all its consequent catastrophe.