Every light sparks crystalline,
As the poet declaims beneath the chandeliers;
“Poetry is the ultimate possibility,
Too much like love for me to say other:
It lies as clear as new country ice.”
Worn thin as that ice by love,
I fall asleep in medias res,
Exhausted by too much practice:
Motions repeated over and over
Until my synapses groove with habit
In two customary paths of truth and slant.
I dream back through my past,
Finding the cliche attic
where each ritual movement
creaks out on the bed
another romantic moment,
another poem printed woodenly
on this most ancient of presses.