On Commonwealth Avenue the trucks slow,

pause, idle, crowding snouts to backsides. Stacks

of new rail-line lie rusting. It’s raining.

Straight ahead I see three hours of telling

my placid class how to read rebelling

poets who died young. A case of training

ears, accustomed not to note a lack

of ragged rhythm, to hear deviation

into sense as meant, chance as vocation.

 

We talk of Keats’s odes and lines reframed 

in correspondence, considering love,

a woman, “a tune of Mozart,” above

the steady hum of drops that fall straight down.

(Do you, I wonder, in another town,

book perhaps before blank eyes, hear raining,

too, random as a fistful of dropped tacks?)

 

“Mozart will do”—the notes yoked tight, lean, black,

that rivet rails to pitch and time and pace.

 

After class, I stand at the stop, in place;

the windless drops strike predestined puddles.

Old tracks have slowed the train.  My mind begins

to drift along the rails—like a bow

wandering on unstopped strings, it skims

a tremulous discord. Some occasion

of serendipity, of the muddle,

first, rash, motiveless breath begets beauty—

all strictest order merely keeps the beat.

(Thus, chaos: empty air

or full of strict parallel strands of rain,

pummeling the blank slate of each brick’s brain.)

 

A dim light glimmers where the rails meet.

 

Nothing, or all things one--these are the same.

No thing to love, or no love among things.

We see the lover, hear the song where strings

touch, are touched, where strand tangles into snare,

and dereliction becomes our duty.

How could we love each other, love deserve,

how could we our pace measure, measure sing,

place or harmony observe,

did not Lucretius’ single atom swerve?