Peter Porter
An End to Envy
The end will come only with the end
of everything, but we must work at it.
We start by imagining a level space
into which the personality
is pressed, a pouting flower contiguous
with solitude, a practised train of leaves
endlessly advantaged by the sun.
We are given evolutionary skill
at being just ourselves, God’s new Ark,
his smallest snail, his globe of nothings.
Then, as if the skin of life were hardening,
we become the domicile of species
and a pompous programme wills we send
our sensual love to settle in a world of beauty,
a world our eyes have sworn to see
through every aperture.
Everything
is being changed and everything
is irreplaceable: we are assessments
of what has hardened out of vapour, has played
the series of the good and bad prosthesis
and wondered why the artificial is
more truthful than the natural. We are
an average of what the mighty and
the minuscule endure. There’ll come a verb
which joins the gifted to the glib:
by this deceit we’ll want for no-one’s
charm or beauty; we’ll be seen as torches
of ourselves, conscious merely
that our envy is the solstice of our praise.
Page(s) 119
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