Poem: Law

*

it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation

the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.

A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.

Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".

It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.

But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home

and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.


What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know

the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free

"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free

to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,

and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.

Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,

well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.

It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.

Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion

of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,

an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.

*