Clark Coolidge

I Drove Through This Old World This Afternoon

and it was ancient, quite, lean and brass

peach gas in bean stacks, babes on bikes of wood
humans held in shelter of their lives

The earth spread wide in folds beneath the turns

of men though new their stores of use were old
as if nothing had stopped that once had turned to brown
alarms of act all casual seemed a gown

I passed the rows of brick where Easter neared

with eggs of varnished ice that vanished not
in air as blue to touch as mountain's thrust is rough
on windows hard with dust that I had traced there once

The town then filled the notch with laddered woods

and brightness hives of stuff all hands grow bare to touch
in crowds that leaned at noon contrariwise
would knot my route make prisms of my eyes

So casts the light this land no time at all

an eddy of the force to elbow shirts

as far beneath the ledge the needle drops
that banisters protrude from stories fast and small

I smell the fall, I dodge the urge

I whistle through the rates of atoms dear
the sky so clear the land to bulge
mere mention of halt plan a care

The light is over

man a boundless stare

2.

Then stood upon a bench that ruled my car

through venturesome whole days far by all unmarked
and watched the boardsides strand an ankled past
by turbines locked by keys of empty glass

As home absorbs the time that held it up

I fill to amber with the light of days
held waste till afternoon had turned them up
and held my mind in furnish of their state

Whole hills of housing edges fold

then massed will each thing fully last
and time come to boil the each turn dark
that breath will cool to beads upon a mast

And as I pass to catch the lost anew

is praps to spy the end of things ahead
and none more bogus than the thing that's new
that fades into a background still more fast

The old ones state their case as plain as sum

I leave them there as thought of one day done

Clark Coolidge. From Solution Passage: 1978-1981. Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 2000.