The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2011

The Fool’s Poem

(with apologies to Jasper Johns, creator of The Fool’s House)

The poem will see you now

and hear you, in every nuance, but

just step back, and there,

it has forgotten everything.

You can try

going back and forwards, try

catching yourself disappearing,

the poem doesn’t mind.

It doesn’t want to be your friend,

isn’t smart enough to see trading favors

staying and being stayed with

through thick and thin – its mind wanders

over thick and thin, all those layers

between light and dark,

volume and the shadows of volumes,

the fine curve and recess of muscles and the stonier croppings

of bones,

how this body (which, just now, is you) is built up

out of what it isn’t and keeps trying to dive back

into the utterly attentive surface of the poem

that can’t help loving you

and will not mourn you.

But you can hang your hat on this poem

and it will stay, it will still be there

when you come back

and leave again, when you are used

to standing inside the frame

and to being gone.

Patrick Daly