Folker

Baby I'll hop the broom
Though I’d rather limbo underneath it

— Paul Westerberg

and I know the homunculus will be there, 
adjusting the oxygen mask then deciding 
to turn off the machines, pressing my paws 
and skull into the tar-pit for preservation, 
swearing to remember, swearing
there will never be another like me, making sure.

— Dean Young, “Today They Will Show Me the Homunculus”

Listening to an album of once-upon-a-time anthems and groveling with delight in simple rhymes that match like the space between footsteps and — yes — overvaluing the light and the lightness implied by “cause anyway’s all right / on a now or never night”.

Also admiring the pacing of these four couplets in one single sentence, as written by Wallace Stevens:

The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda

Among the second selves, sailor, observe
The rioter that appears when things are changed,

Asserting itself in an element that is free,
In the alien freedom that such selves degustate:

In the first inch of night, the stellar summering
At three-quarters gone, the morning's prescience,

As if, alone on a mountain, it saw far-off
An innocence approaching toward its peak.

And eyeing these four sentences in a single (long) stanza with ragged edges, as penned by Marvin Bell:

Epithalamium

If you twist a rope
twist it and twist it
no matter how long a rope it is
after a while you cannot make one more turn
without skinning your palms
and burning the backs of your knuckles
and if you lift one hand from the rope
to get a better grip
the whole thing springs back
toward its most direct shape
its original being
with the fury of a coiled spring
at having been diverted from its purpose.
Every fiber of its being
rolls over on its back
the way molecules according to science
align themselves magnetically.
It is instructive to imagine that
the atoms in a rope
know where they belong
when you see those sad pieces of twine
that retail clerks wind around
boxes of socks and drinking glasses,
from which broken strands seem to reproduce
and under which the box strains outward.
And it is comforting to acknowledge it
when the molecules of a husband align themselves
with those of a wife
and the iron filings on the desk
connect the two ends of a horseshoe magnet underneath
as the moon follows the earth
forever in darkness.

Groveling (again) in the end-rhyme of a/a/b/c/c(slant)/b from St. Westerberg:

She's my better half
When she makes me laugh
When she don't, she ain't
The one that I like best
With the two-buck dress
She ain't no saint

And studying that exuberant line by Gerald Manley Hopkins which Theodore Roethke picked up to title (and drive) a poem that toils among the (now-sleeping) gardens:

Long Live the Weeds

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm! –
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marked by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit,
Hope, look, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.

And finally, a unequivocal tenderness for a friend, as written and dreamt by Jean Valentine:

If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them

        in memory of Reginald Shepherd 

Dear Reginald,
It is morning.
I sit at a table
writing a letter
with a needle and thread.

*

I pricked my finger         A pelican 
out of her migratory path,
even her language family—
whose child is gone
yet she absently pecks at her breast.

*

I write on the bedspread
I am making for you there
May you breathe deeply and easily.
If a person visits someone in a dream,
in some cultures the dreamer thanks them in the morning
for visiting their dream.

*

I call it dream
not that I am drawn to that which withdraws
but to him pearled, asleep, who never withdraws.

*

At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and
damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if
they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are
ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.

*

Can you breathe all right?
Break the glass        shout
break the glass         force the room
break the thread       Open
the music behind the glass.

*

Remember that blue vine?    Grown
                            alongside the gate

fourteenth century
                        Venus close as the moon

the bowl of the skull    turning here
                                         lifting that

Appositely, but also hinged to the key of G in the negations and machinations of memory:

I'm in love with a dream I had as a kid
I wait up the street until you show
That dream it came true, but you never do
No you never did
As far as I know