someone is required

Someone is required to contrast sunlight
on river water and the slow movement
of thoughtless clouds over a flotilla
parading this festival of summertime...

to contrast these gathered souls lounging
on blankets where the grass gently slopes, 
their bottled beer and music somewhere...

to contrast this spectacle and ease 
with the condition of upper floors
in old buildings gone to disuse,
now holding strange shadows
and volumes of schizophrenia.

Up there in lost crazed rooms,
business has long since ceased.
Old buildings now listen curiously
to vagrant sounds drifting on wind
from the Little Rock streets below,
sounds of living and traffic moving
through a hypnotism of time.

Someone is required to consider
the pathology of voices echoing
from other eras in dark rooms,
where dust covers arcane objects
that grope for shape in slow amnesia.

Someone is required to be ambivalent
about festival airs and conversations
not far from the madness of structures. 


Ysolt, Ydone,
                      have compassion,
Picarda,
             compassion 
By the win'g head,
                  by the caduseus,
                                            compassion;
By the horns of Isis-Luna,
                                            compassion. *



* from Canto XCIII by Ezra Pound


~ TB, 2013