After Carol Ann Duffy’s Treasure
How the poet called lies
fool’s gold. Still, and none-
the-less, kept: beloved treasure.
Hoarded, lidded when dark is being
lifted. Its precision. The dark. It’s – it is –
precision we’re consistently
calibrating,
weighing, eye-
balling the needle or digits on the machine.
Having
been in
the mine or in
the wide-open sky finding or trying
to find
in the sluice and slurry
dredge and hammer and ax and bleeding
hands, it’s all drawn back to
itself,
where and under what
circumstances it was made and yet
to be made. As we read, real gold
is being made. Aging. Tell me, how do you expand
and then tame worth? And then tell me:
which is more? Labor to break
the world and her dirt open to expose the broken
or brief
lode of gold, to stow it
folded, in the once was skin of
a young doe? Or the
broker, who presses
his scale in his favor by lifting
some of it away, unpaid for?
Or the jeweler
with her
warm ores pouring,
then briefly ssssssssst, quenched?
Or is the worth
the
beholder? The beholding?
The seam of truth depleting to dusts
into autumn, under the yellows fallen,
suffering
such a leave-taking
in the curl (how the not yet brutal fifteen
below
zero, she is yet
months off) against the rib and stem
a
particularly brilliant cuff
of solid sun that when lifted
crumbles, succumbs to the drift
of wind, bits of it gone for always,
bits of it briefly near: the elbow,
the toe, the yet to be licked or kissed
lips .
. .
