Written Landscapes

the world’s a poem that doesn’t rhyme
it lacks a certain metric or sense of time

our world is a string of endless signifieds
generating infinite possibilities of meaning

a textual fabric written and rewritten as it’s
translated from perception to consciousness

reading is reiteration mere reification
of artificial constructs of the natural world

wordsworth long ago wrote the harmony
of nature in the style of an old church hymn

then later turned to higher forms flowing
lines of tintern abbey and an immortal ode

to see a godlike harmony and beauty
we no longer see in nature or in poetry

our awareness of the world is quite distant
from wordsworth’s imagined state of nature

his accounts of early spring and daffodils
seem written from the perspective of

outside observer as though he wrote
while looking out a window or at a painting

we cannot write wordsworth’s garden
for nature outside of the artifice of poetry

is really nothing but the perpetual exercise
of sex and violence where wolves run through

evergreen forests and dormant kudzu drapes
the world like grey cobwebs in a haunted attic

if there is harmony in the world it is wrought
of our writing like the painting of a landscape
 

 Note: There is quote from Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" in the poem.