Valiant En Abyme

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,

These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,

Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,

Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot,

Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert

It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind

Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel,

Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep

At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing

On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons

Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance,

Looping past rivers and mountains as one leaps from bed

To bed to make loneliness lonely, the suburbs were for him

A relief, a pageant of calm desire where he settled,

All the king’s horses grazing on forsythia out back

While the evening tilts back out of the night, a kindly drunk

Uncle, and asks you to stay. Was this the end of traveling?

Or just a change in the story over time, as for example how

Tous les chevaux du roi become Josie and the Pussycats

From one version to the next? So all heroes are deranged

By something quite common yet unexpected, a constellation

Redrawn and named again through the stars

Above the porch don’t shift but seem to sink

Through winter’s pitcher of noircotic ink,

Leaving a single streetlight that burned happily,

Thinking it was the sun, after all it was the day

Of the night and turned the world around it,

We were good sentences and forgot where we started.

Source: The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006)