(An Attitudinizing Winter Solstitially)

Kenneth Burke

What with one Thing's doing being another's undoing
and all adding up to Universal Ing-Ing

and while we cannot know all
whereof is getting said about

anyone by being as though abandoned could realize
close up how being left, felt,
it was disclosed to my Master
in a moment of Supreme Vision

with the late-Fall Sun just come
upfrombehind the hill

into total cloudlessness to bathe
through the window me with my typewriter

all thus as though every detail
had been arranged by prearrangement meaningfully

in the sign of in the spirit
of meaning-in-general (which is what?)

or but seeing the other side of
withinnesses of withinnesses

me thus planning for sure to linger on
through all the TEN DAMNEDEST WEEKS of this immediately coming year

and maybe write some lines to match my outcry
of those correspondingly TEN DAMNEDEST last year,

Jan., Feb., to mid-March, getting all sorts
of flotsam and jetsam and dis jecta membra

of Unfinished Bizz slapped into shape for filing
as planfully as a mourning dove of a spring morning

despite when as winter comes what more at best
than wintrier winters can be far behind

towards temporary remedies for the incurably aging
towards purpose perforce irreversibly forevermost

within all Lamentation there being faint traces of Hope
always unto Ing-Ing in Anagrammatic Songfulness:

      May all

out LIVE
the VILE
Maya VEIL
of EVIL

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Late Poems, 1968–1993 Attitudinizings Verse-wise, While Fending for One's Selph, and in a Style Somewhat Artificially Colloquial Kenneth Burke Edited by Julie Whitaker and David Blakesley © 2005 by the University of South Carolina The first publication of over 150 poems from Burke's final decades 6 x 9, 256 pages; cloth, 1-57003-589-X, $39.95s; Studies in Rhetoric/Communication, Thomas W. Benson, series editor

KB Journal is grateful to the University of South Carolina Press for permission republish Kenneth Burke's poetry.. Please visit the USC website to learn more about this book and others in the Studies in Rhetoric/Communication series. You can also download the flyer and order form (PDF format).