There Is Much More To Say

In the zocalo (there should be an acute
Accent over the 'o' -- but I am too lazy
To fix what is, within my execution, lacking)
a one-eyed salesman (again,
Here I would have capitalized the beginning
Of a line, perhaps because I have not grasped
The signification of the lower-case, could not shake
The shackles of mute centuries, holding sentences
In terror by their sway, which have had
And thus still have in me their definitive
Say) offers me a gourd
wrinkled
dried
with the face of God
painted on it
in cochineal & indigo

God is dead,
I tell him.

You are right,
he answers,
but it is only one peso.

I shake the gourd;
the seeds rattle
like thoughts in a dry brain.

O unfortunate country!

No interruption: the real terror
Of transcribing -- a purely arbitrary act
Nonetheless belonging to a will, which judges,
"There shall be poetry!" And so gives us
Someone else's. What am I to say?

Every moment of the experiment unfolds
As another verse (of no moment),
And the farther the carpet unrolls,
The smaller the words
From which it departed
Become,
As these too grow more distant:

For instance I have nothing to serve
So fancy as cochineal,
Of which I had never even heard
-- until now.

But maybe that's the purpose of poetry:
Hearing something new.

And now you have heard it too.
You will repeat it to yourselves again.
And an impression's replication
-- An idea's respiration --
Will have been served.