Lecture on a Lean Life of Allegory

Today's subject is an architecture of cards,
laminate, cool, telling no fortunes. It's
the world reduced to a series of integers
plus a face or two, a synthetic temple

abstracted from play. Its constructors
regard it from the terrace as it stands
in the yard, according to custom, a measure
of their compulsions, a phantasm squared.

They know little other to think of, each
being enlarged, abandoned by absolutes,
recognizing little of how things are found
in things, of the lust for dirty objects, objects

at odds with evanescence, the air, azaleas
and mown grass ransacked by metaphor;
or of the errors that give access to objects,
the stubborn conversions beneath the pines.