I'm afraid you've mistaken me, poe-facéd foal
For primordial chaos, or some other role
In Manichean struggle posed against the force
Of Order and of Good and the world of Horse.
But you know, young mare, Discord is nothing without
Some pattern to disrupt or some rule to flout
I admit in these transgressions I do delight,
But I've this defense, at least: you started this fight.
And my weapons, furthermore, I never did forge;
They emerge from overweening hubris engorged
On the dream of a net that can bind in its knots
All that is or might be, and all you lot forgot.
For once upon a time, my dear (your poets never sing)
The globe was young, the dew was fresh, and I was everything.
The air and water flowed as one
Hear me: no words can tell you how
Light ran like music from the sun
And of one piece were grass and cow.
In timeless bliss I spent my days
Though forests and the whis'pring breeze
On afternoons and nights I'd laze
I was the wind; I was the trees.
'Til ponies looked on hill and rill
(I damn their thoughtful, seeking eyes)
And slowly cast aside whole truth
For precise, ever-smaller lies.
Abstractions and
distinctions
and they
Cut me
vivisected
limb
from
limb
with blades
of
measured sound.
Quills and figures, maps and lines.
Periphery and metropole
What boundary each word defines:
Each leaf and twig and root and bole.
Recall you not that a tree once stood
Stretching arms to the unguarded sky
And that tree was but part of a far greater wood
And the wood of a world named I!
But the wood is gone, now; it is balsams and oaks
Made of organelles locked in cramped cells.
The grid partitions all. Life strains under the yoke.
Wriggling from words' grasp, it rebels.
For there is still some space twixt the twig and the leaf,
Twixt the mare and the colt and the foal;
In interstices threading like rot through belief
That the parts can account for the whole.
And it's there you find me--in the grey-shades and fights
Between this word and that for demesne;
The penumbra where time is both twilight and night,
And the coat is at one with the mane.
So when this one is thine--or no, wait, is it mine?
When you can't tell a net from a sieve;
When you find a new kind that crosses an old line,
There, where orders collide, I still live.