FIELDWORK on Cornucopia Peak, Looking for Gold! (no luck...)
(± 8600 feet VI.30.08) View over Pine Valley & the community of Halfway,
NORTHEAST OREGON . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.
FIELDWORK on Cornucopia Peak, Looking for Gold! (no luck...)
(± 8600 feet VI.30.08) View over Pine Valley & the community of Halfway,
NORTHEAST OREGON . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.
FOOL'S PROSPECT—
to the reader . . .
Dear reader: What do you honestly think?
How ought I best spend my days?
Should I dig in dank dark loam for new poems,
or ought I better be out looking for specks of real gold?
O, how I envy the industrious ant,
those little beings who rule the world,
but a mere millionth of my own weak weight,
dragging past me
the lifeless carcass of another species
very much larger than itself.
What booty! What satisfaction
at work well done!
No doubt or hesitation there!
Yet here I sit and scribble away
at works as useless as they are hopelessly ignored.
Away with meaning and beauty, I say. Enough!
Money is what I lust for. Pockets filled with cash.
A thousand plastic cards. More loans from God,
from the Devil, who cares!
And then, as my pan comes up empty again,
reality strikes with nothing to show for my work today,
nothing but cold hands and a sore back,
O slowly, slowly, slowly . . .
How slowly I learn to see, to hear that all that sounds
right on my composing tablet may,
once put under the neutral hammer of truth,
be but more shiny, attractive—
yet oh-so-easily shattered—
fool’s prospect.
Camp Lost & Found,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, IX.1.2008
THE LITTLE CLAVIER please preview 150 of 631 pages
w/ my black & white photography [opens in new window]
All Photographs & texts by Cliff Crego © 1999 -2011 picture-poems.com
(created: IV.27.2008)
