Yarrow House

Electrical Man and the Chemical Kid
Go to the Park

Chemical kid quivers in place
hit by storms of joy and fear
now and here are good enough
and delight the gift of the moment.
Here and here and still here,
everywhere is here.

Electrical man on the other hand
could do, could always do,
with a change of pace, a paragraph
to measure and describe the value
of this moment and any other
irretrievable glimpse into time,
names and naming and the listing of
names, categories full of items,
balancing and weighing this against
that so neatly, orderly progress from here to there,
from then to now.

Now, now the kid cries. Stop measuring
start listening. I tell you now,
look at this one and only
luscious, eager lily with its curled
petals and bursting erection of pistil
and stamen. Stop weighing
everything. Just look at that
golden-scaled carp carving the rain
circled surface of the brown pond
with its ribbed fin.

But meaning intrudes, or the question
of meaning, or the questioning
of meaningfulness as seen in a golden
fin wavering through a target of rain drops.
Balanced against the eternity of darkness,
this fishy fin is hardly anything,
a note, a blip, a flash in time
and gone to what end?

And the kid answers, to this end,
to here, and still here.

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Onetime reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted by the author with the following credit line: © Judith Yarrow, 1998