Incarnation

Grandma / in her garden told me there’s just
One law: that a poem can only live for
So long / in the abstract, in the ether air
One night / a symbol wraps itself in tangi-
Ble hide / rolls around in concrete visu-
Al life / in a way that readers like to read
But in time the skin it hardens
First into a tree, then a stone
It assume its final form, its
Body back to language, transformed
Grandma / in her garden told me there’s just
One law: that a poem can only live for
So long / in the abstract, in the ether air