Free Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter Page A

think
    tank for non-thinkers
    in their open-mouthed
    safety-in-numbers forage,
    needing no courage.
    Yet so beautiful:
    mathematically serving
    one end while swerving
    in a fraction of
    a second into action:
    how do they sense when
    to advance or back-
    track, tail that guy, or swallow
    the law to follow?
    Somewhat in the line
    of Leibniz, Mandelbrot coined
    the term fractal: it’s
    the hall-of-mirrors
    parthenogenesis of
    a recursive, nonce,
    anonymously
    irregular form: i.e.,
    copies no other
    formula can make.
    (I learned that when I got home.)
    An eye on either
    side of a flat head
    is useful, I read; herring
    have a keen sense of hearing,
    but it’s not that that
    gives them their unerring
    “high polarity,”
    pooling together
    just close enough to discern
    skin on a neighbor,
    far enough to skirt
    collision. That’s a vision
    scaled for fish—but what
    human can marshal
    acceptance, much less a wish,
    for sight so partial?
    “Stand back from the glass,
    make room for the universe,”
    I thought then; “at least
    for whatever we
    can compass: iteration
    on iteration,
    until fish fill the ocean.”

THE GODS
    I always seem to have tickets
    in the third or fourth balcony
    (a perch for irony;
    a circle of hell the Brits
    tend to call “the gods”),
    and peer down from a tier
    of that empyrean
    at some tuxedoed insect
    scrabbling on a piano.
    Some nights there’s a concerto,
    and ranks of sound amass
    until it’s raining upward
    (violin bows for lightning)
    from a black thundercloud.
    A railing has been installed
    precisely at eye level—
    which leads the gaze, frustrated,
    still higher to the vault
    of the gilt-encrusted ceiling,
    where a vaguely understood
    fresco that must be good
    shows nymphs or angels wrapped
    in windswept drapery.
    Inscribed like the gray curls
    around the distant bald spot
    of the eminent conductor,
    great names— DA VINCI PLATO
    WHITTIER DEBUSSY —
    form one long signature,
    fascinatingly random,
    at the marble base of the dome.
    It’s more the well-fed gods
    of philanthropy who seem
    enshrined in all their funny,
    decent, noble, wrong
    postulates, and who haunt
    these pillared concert halls,
    the tinkling foyers strung
    with chandeliered ideals,
    having selected which
    dated virtues— COURAGE
    HONOR BROTHERHOOD —rated
    chiseling into stone;
    having been quite sure
    that virtue was a thing
    all men sought, the sublime
    a mode subliminally
    fostered by mentioning
    monumentally.
    All men. Never a woman’s
    name, of course, although
    off-shoulder pulchritude
    gets featured overhead—
    and abstractions you might go
    to women for, like BEAUTY
    JUSTICE LIBERTY .
    Yet at the intermission,
    I generally descend
    the spiral stairs unjustly
    for a costly, vacant seat
    I haven’t paid for. Tonight
    I’ve slipped into D9.
    The lights dim. Warm applause
    and, after a thrilling pause,
    some stiff-necked vanities
    for a moment float away—
    all the gorgeous, nameless,
    shifting discordances
    of the world cry aloud; allowed
    at last, I close my eyes.

A TOAST FOR RICHARD WILBUR
    On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his first book ,
The Beautiful Changes
    Poems like yours are, frankly, hard to beat—
    snapping and flapping from each line
    like a deceptively blank sheet
    that turns into an angel—but
    of course the image isn’t mine;
    your poems inspire the rest of us to cheat.
    So, while I’m out borrowing, let me steal
        another angel from your brain.
        I’m thinking of Bruna Sandoval
        in your “Plain Song for Comadre,”
        who mopped the church floor seventeen
    years, and daily saw her tinted pail
    of scrubwater take the sheen of heavenly wings.
        For fifty years the beautiful change
        you’ve wrought upon the plainest things
        of this world has been like that—
        a private labor to estrange
    the eye from yesterday, so that it brings
    forward the clean habit of surprise.
        To become a