History Without Stopping
____________________________________

Once you get it all down imperfectly, the ceiling
rolled away, general bloom or morning into canyons

wild with plums, corn shadow, oily street or episodes
of sand and pipers whistling triplets down along a shore,

the vivid sense of the actual you actually notice
in your attempts to account for why things are

what such light has against empty space, how much
to do with anything window-bathed a window has,

you'll learn enough about where you are, skin
under clothes or the depths of things, something

in between extremes suggesting tables and umbrellas,
trays and trays of drinks, the day at anchor. You'll learn

enough about history to suspect it ain’t going to turn out
the way you had thought. Today still sweeps horizon

to horizon, the coldly lyrical to something warmer
finally. Little clouds of walkers in the heat, a man

tells usually a woman with her groceries
that he’d learned to recognize as a child

the maps printed mornings at the weather station
and tacked up at the schools early afternoons,

how to any single drop of it, rain
is always standing still.

 

From Nude With Anything by James D'Agostino, 2006

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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