Pan Out

Reading’s becoming desperate,
The need to find workable veins,
Not just individual flecks,

Places to pickaxe into seams
Rich enough to be worth digging
Straight into dark with no regard

For the weather outside the shaft,
Sacking enough ore the donkey
Will have to pull it on a sledge

Down the raw slope of the mountain
To bring it to the bank in town.
That’s the dream, that is. But reading

Is so desperate in these cliffs,
A glitter here, a nugget there,
Swept down from somewhere, then never

Leading upslope to that broken
Place where the poetry furnace
Under the earth created gold

And then gave it up. The weather
For fine reading will wither soon.
Prospecting season will go fast.

Reading’s becoming desperate
In the scree of these pockmarked cliffs
Where maybe no more seams exist.