III.

Although the land itself is rolling and pitted,
the pole tips form a horizontal plane
flat enough to support a sheet of glass.
Walking among them, you don't notice that
the poles' lengths vary by over seven feet—
they look identical—what is disarming
is the languor-inducing rhythm of their recurrence.
They are far enough apart that as you walk
between them it is hard to keep in mind
the multi-angled interrelationships
that subtly tug at you from all directions
when you stop and stand next to any one of them.
Or is it that the two hundred and twenty feet
(three hundred and eleven, cutting across
the diagonal) allow you to forget?
You might be holding hands, stumbling over
the rough terrain, listening hard for crickets,
absorbed in particular by nothing,
maybe mulling over the near-homonyms
liar and lyre, or talking of love, your love,
and how the breasts on Michaelangelo's women
are like sacs affixed to a man's musculature,
when, mid-sentence, you are stopped up short
by an innocuous-looking juncture, and forced
to scrutinize the meaning of your next step.