after paintings by Piet Mondrian
The pier and ocean. What has happened here?
What freedom is it that we’ve won
now the ocean overwhelms the pier?
The pier is gone, or almost gone,
the lines that it was made of more or less
disaggregated now till all we have
are plus and minus signs, a meaningless
eolian effect upon the waves.
Is this what we’ve become? No sun,
no sky, no water we’re familiar with,
only broken-up geometry
that bears no trace of what we’d been.
We left the pier behind, what it was worth
we didn’t know, and now we are at sea.