Happy Monday. This week's poem is from A Passage of Saint Devil by Duncan McNaughton (Talonbooks, 1976). There's no link because it doesn't show up on our site. But believe me, we have it, and it's beautiful. Stop by or call if you want to buy one.
Ode
Open if honor for love and art
vanishes in the precision
we dishonor, others imagine
observing constance when it is instance
we dread, and resemblant
let it wither as stone wore
out for the old ones after wood--
it was never meant to
stay in place forever, much less to offer
chance divers exercises in time
or collapse so nearly
merely extension. But the knots
you cord events
disturb the looming
areal circumvention, our
breath. Esotericism is never
more than the near perfect practice
of the real, string,
carpets, eventually
commerce, not trade but
transaction of persons the secret
invitation found as result of
donative impression,
gravitational prehension.