Simply gazing upward on any of those kinder
and woozy autumn mornings
from her stroller and knowing a thing
called "sky" lie above her
but nevertheless seeing only
"clouds," arrayed crisply
and dark in their vast
rolling panoplies—this act already
comprised a certain way
for the small child
to own, within her abridged little body,
a very uncertain feeling.
A feeling that
she would later
come to feel intimately, though
never know directly—of two things
which can occupy distinctly
the very same space
at the very same time—
but for very different reasons.
Surely enough,
various pairs
of steely words would rush
to fill in and help illustrate the big feeling later.
Heaven and Hell,
Progress and History (of each
of the battles
won by her country),
Science and Fiction—
and the absurd
amount of friction
between Sci-fi and Fantasy
(not to mention, along the way,
the very annoying disparity of meaning
between certain wily pairs
like—"discrete" and "discreetly").
And—not too long after,
some subtler and more curious notions
began to inhabit her senses
and reveal to her their strange power;
there was, for instance,
the fantastic influence
of the traffic
upon the weather,
of the wealthy
upon the poor
and the poor-in-spirit
upon the healthy;
then—the smell
of cold rain
but the wild
sight of fire,
and both held together simultaneously
by the thin astringent vinegar-y,
or else
by the corpulent warm oily
sensation of blood—
which always came rushing wherever
(she noted very cautiously
whenever speaking publicly)
the soul
seemed to drip—neither
with any great hate
nor with very
much love—
from the body.