JOHN LATTA

A year

CXC
Either everything is palpably here—that 
tiger lily bobbing up colossally orange
with mole-sized spots, the ivory-

color’d moon’s hammer’d thin fatidic look
of being preoccupy’d somewhere beyond ken,
the rose with its red brush’d

up like fur—or everything is
part of a rotary chain of
beleaguer’d correspondences routinely haul’d forth by

a system of pulleys hid deep
in the skulls of undone robots.
Dunned one is by possibility, though

so what? What if that insect—
one of the rarer hymenoptera—settling
down weightless into the sparsely-hair’d

zone of one’s wrist-bone, is
a mechanical toy so adequately executed,
so fill’d with grammar and rudiments

of insect-design the whole worldly
apparatus clowns in around it? The
way a hummed strain of music

is proviso enough for a complete
orchestra to bloom up melodic and
divine: sustainably engendering God-knows-what.

---

John Latta is the author of several poetry collections including  Breeze (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003),  Rubbing Torsos (Ithaca House, 1979) and Some Alphabets (Agincourt Press, 2022). He blogs at Isola di Rifiuti