time, like plastic, lasts forever.
You think in prose the poem
cuts into. What are you thinking about?
The plastic computer eats the signal
forever. The evergreen forest,
rainstorms, program music
are signals. But a diamond
in its loneliness
doesn’t outlast anything —
the signals pass over into plastic,
rainstorms and program music.
Nothing in the uncut diamond.
I would write to you in poetry
on the computer and you
would read a computer, not
the evergreen forest,
not the lonely little diamond
made up inside it.
This poem “For” originally appeared in Meanwhile, Home. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 232 (Spring 2017): 46.
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