You didn't have to travel to become an airplane,
nor fly to get high. Considerable numbers languished
in your exclusive calculations. You would wind up abroad.
You choose home entertainment and the mechanical society.
The machine had machines which told machines all about it.
The machine knew, for example, of sensational airwaves.
The machine knew how to go up and how to drop down.
The machine knew all the exits, and the best exits.
Then your metabolism changed and you entered energy:
model-making glue, carbon, tet., solder, a piezo-electric
crystal-controlled oscillator smelled like the real thing,
and gave you the advantage of interchangeable frequencies.
You were calibrating fame and the landscapes you entered.
you could prove forty-eight states and Britain
and at dusk you could prove the small isles of the Atlantic.
You spoke to every radio on St.Pierre and Miquelon Islands!
Fifteen years later, you abandoned your license,
just as the next generation was entering chemicals.
You were writing, compulsively, bit nothing fashinable.
A poem on your birthday seemed out of the question.
Yet, here you are, celebrating, speaking openly as if
the moral of aesthetics is that the parable convinces.
The easy way out, you concluded, is through the village,
under the antenna, down the long path intended for your feet.
(1967)
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