Keith Waldrop

Progressing

At birth whole

areas of the globe are

still uncommitted.

Something I just

picked up along

the way. My inertia,

well, my 

inertia--I can

blame it on the constellations, can't I?

The pity is, in

'middle' life, I'm getting clumsy, mis-

calculating, now,

distances between my physical

influence and

various things, some of them

breakable. And I used to

slip by so carefully, skirting

an ambush of objects poised to fall, the

planet that presided

at my birth having been

in, oh, fastidious conjunction, but now--

this on high authority--losing

its grip, wandering (taking myself

as a point of reference), and from now on

whatever controls there

are for my headlong

career must proceed directly

from the stars of the microcosm.

--Keith Waldrop

fr. The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander

[Providence: Lost Roads, 1990]

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