poetry makes nothing happen
–Auden
You’re nothing.
Travelers scramble by
over bridges and culverts
without a pause for
your obscure babble.
Only the road matters.
It pushes you out of the way
as if your rolling rhythms
over mossy rocks and roots
obstruct the day’s mad rush.
Still something happens—
a presence in an absence,
the sense can’t be erased.
You persist, flow on south
as Auden said of Yeats.
