Sestina

Standing on the great wide plain
I tried but could not feel embarrassment.
I clapped my hands, farted, walked in a wide circle
Flapping my arms and shouting obscenities into the sky.
Still, the emotion refused to emerge.
I got to thinking in terms of metaphysics:

The basics, not this “what is being” kind of metaphysics,
But the idea that things, plain
old things, real things, will emerge
as solutions to problems like embarrassment.
A bird might drop dead out of the sky
Or likewise, looking behind me at the circle

Of worn dirt, dust rises in the shape of a circle
Sticking to my sweaty head, thinking about metaphysics.
Suddenly I see a tree outlined against the sky
And it comes to me, somehow, it’s this plain
This place. I’m too comfortable for embarrassment.
So in order for it to emerge

I began to remove my clothes, to emerge
In somebody else’s dream, thoughts racing in a circle
In myself, but still no embarrassment.
The wind, or the metaphysics
Of an imagined wind, pricks the hair on my arm, the plain
Curve of a goose bump beneath the sky

Blue sky
Apart as object before nerve endings emerge
And I feel connected in plain
Straight vectors from the bones that en-circle
My heart. Removed from all this talk about metaphysics
I touch my lip: embarrassment

Not as addition to but embarrassment
in place of. The sky
turns red as the Earth revolves or metaphysics
As explanations that emerge
And replace the original: a circle
For an eye, a line for a plain

For a sky filled with embarrassment.
As people began to emerge, there I was on a plain
naked and walking in a circle. We didn’t talk about metaphysics.