After we found the sack of tchotchkes in the garage
Next to the Ntozake Shange souvenir poster
And the three jars of chow-chow from last year's
Atlanta car trip to Cleve's funeral and the fifty-pound bag
Of sand for luminaries, we thought again of Thales,
When he whispered one day in 600 B.C. that matter

Was mostly water, and therefore water was mostly
Matter, the water of matter, the matter of water, this
Mantra, this to and this fro, interrupted by the rustling
Sound from a nearby box of froufrou, of sateen and tabby,

Calendared and moiréd to look like waves, waves of silk,
The illusion of water, for Thales knew then that
The honchos were the ones to abscond with the ichor,
To fill their vials with it, to sip it during homecomings,

But for years we've been through with that school of thought,
So uncool, so full of tsimmes and the loud twang
Of death, the gimcrack meant to confuse, the gewgaws
In the headlight's white glare, bags of swag handed out

To the hands of the injudicious, for if we can call
A group of toads a knot, and even if we did not
Witness the long e change that turned Keats into Keats
But kept Yeats as Yeats, isn't now time to hang up

The choke chain, face down the snarl, throw
Down the poncho of belief and wonder
On the rancho-lands of despair and concrete,
Dare ourselves for once in our lives to be spilled?