Do Not Do as the Poets Do

Do not skip straight past the result
Of the bad thing happening, past
The multiple open fractures,

To contemplation of events—
The terror of the fall, the fall,
The horror of the fall, but not

The fall’s actual consequence,
Which is not the pain (messenger
Of more terror, future horrors),

But the remaking of the world
In which you had lived until then,
The now postlapsarian world

Where the boundaries have altered,
Not poetically and not
Utterly—irrevocably.

They do that all the time, really,
But the fall, the heralding pain,
Ring out the changing of the name

Of the whole world, of an ancient
Nation at the least, announcing,
Now, right where you’re lying, you live

And will live from now on within
Another country, another
World suspiciously familiar

But never again the country
That, up until the fall’s result,
You’d always known that you lived in.