Stretching myself, scapula peeled back like the sky:
Knowing and not knowing, so not writing down
the nascent, subsoil milky specks at night
(and more twinkle out if you look longer).
To calm the rods in the eyes of the dandelions,
this I have learned by eating all the UV rays
and casting skin of my poems,
hiding convex in
curled-toe honeydews,
whether parasamgate pairs
of aphids
are to be spoken, their
velvet skin, the most unnatural neons, seeming like
garbhas of seaweed
and barnacled pupils lapping
without dimension…
Is this what is to be learned?
Is this all that I have learned
in the past murky warp of a year?
that I am too surrealistically snotty
and too wildly naturalistic to enjoy Hart Crane and T.S. Eliot anymore?
too obsessed with Taoist and Zen hermits to enjoy Shakespeare anymore?
or is the real lesson the unwhispered waters of wonder,
that the sweetgum glow hazel
in August on earth pure lands
with or without ontology,
their seeds home to unimaginable Buddha lands,
capillaries pressed out
in unpunctured volcanic dicots
returned to the unchanging inner monocot—
I’ve learned I’m too skiddish to be a contemplative for now,
my last name is Jennings, not Merton,
and maybe that’s a ton better for me,
nothingness being flowers, la mer, and nothingness—
inside the dead ladybug on my windowsill,
clouds beckon unswept revelations…
—Tom Jennings
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