the Common Place

In re: Every Thing That is The Case by Chris Schoen at underverse

The Way

by William Bronk

There is the world, we say, and mean a kind
of mechanism, big machine that stands
there mornings when we come on. We check the gauge
and pull a lever we learned to pull, and wait,
and stuff comes out. We put stuff in. And wait.
Nights, we go home and rest. After a while of this,
we stop; and, mornings, someone else comes on.

This is the way we made to look at things.
The way is always there, you can bank on that,
though the flow of the slot is fuller here or there
or it dwindles away. We scheme then, over moves
to make more stuff come out, or a trick technique
to overlay whole sections like a new
machine, devise a way: it works somehow.

These changes are written down: what ones were made
and who served where and when - how many days.
It makes it seem more real except that real
is what it doesn’t seem at all: the skips
at night, the end a blank. What went wrong?
It isn’t the way things are, but only a way
we made to look at things, among various ways.

It has rewards: the pellets of food we get
are the soothing boon of problems solved
because they were solvable. We grasp at that.
We wish it might be so who sleep and die
- do what we call those names, not knowing what
we do, yet wanting a life outside the one
that sleeping drifts towards, death illuminates.

From Life Supports: New and Collected Poems

More William Bronk:

Poetry Magazine

Bio on AmericaPoems.com