Weeping Branch Poem by Marjorie Welish

Mist in modern discourse:
protesting decor, Lavender Mist.
Dismissive of mist's specifications
and spacing on canvas, you now have

know-how - decorative, unless it is
axiomatic lyricism; the lyric,
not too decorative, unless it is
complacent. Prejudicial against lyric

when he said too decorative,
and so-so. Begetting
a folio.
No synonymy here.

You and your crazy appetite
for pink, embracing the entire antipathy
and craze. Pink and black automotive
rhetoric, half camp / half criticism, fuchsia

usage arousing fear with precisely arborescent
irony toward consensus which does undo, leaps out at the reader.
Decor if and only if complacent pastel.
The world made up of brains in vats.

The world is a boat.
The world is dated half-truth:
1200; the author says 1950: which
something: epical, lyrical, epical-lyrical,

dramatic - which omitted category
is it?: 1968; yes, but which 1968?: 1789 or 1815;
1855 or 1890 or 1913 or 1948?
Now we are of the belief

there is an epistemology for all occasions,
systemic black and silver, silver and error.
Satyric pink and black proclaimed again
face to face, and on the mouth.

2
An answer obscuring lyricism, the lyric
the lyre
in radio waves. Prejudicial against
the lyric, he bruised it

then he took it from a confusion
of lyricism and lyric
and the calligram. Dissent and enterprising
letters so begetting a folio: the lyric.

You and your crazy cocktails, pink and black,
lyric silvered
and Four Saints, revealing her period
lyricism.