childless, the old woman beats  
				the laundry on flat rocks, fish pass...	
		
That is Not a Geode.						 	
The winter sun, 
light through an empty nest		

				the river lullaby re-calls
fresh
flickers on a quick film.
Back-cover on a thin book.
Thumbnail at a website.

The obvious importance
to the measure of man is 
'this is not a pipe.'
'That is not a yolk.' 

Through redundancy it signifies 
negative restatement; redoubles 
its sense of obvious redundancy, 
as was the ovoid obvious; as is,

'This is not a yoke 
with a sliced corner.'

This is a clean surface,
bruised by impact, a dark sun 
implicated by inference; 
the space inferred, committed 
to the crimes of object; 
fingerprints along the wall 
to keep time in slapping sounds 
upon the wooden floor.

The Calendrical marks remain:
The main-drive, the choke,
the gears that deliver golden peach -- 
a spatial indecision across 
a granite sea; the paper ocean shore, 
a napkin sun sliced half and 
half again before the one went dark 
against a backdrop of sky islands 
floated upon the precision of nature. 


Solid as a roc's egg, it must have been 
that light bent under a Midwestern sky 
that broke from its dark rock core
and stood above the icy river; 
dreamt of spring in furrows and berms;
the sky swirling, the tides of space 
unfenced and momentarily placed where 
Momotaro might have settled scores
across a fragile shell of night. 

Gone! the fabled roc that soars above it all, 
sits in the great tree, no measure of man 
-- no man-of-wars, sliced half and half again 
before the dark sun came and went
and, as before,

as if war fit -- oh, so like the gloves
of peace, it found no doves to fight against,
as if to say , 'This is not a war.' 


This is not a village. Time passes.
This is still not a village.
'That is not a clock.'