Here are the old folks anchored by old wisdom
to the ground, or by old wisdom swiveling
on one foot and deliberately tracing a camber
in the horizon, karate chop by karate chop.
So many meticulous minutes into this,
if no castles in the air, they’ve outlined
that curvilinear ebb and flow in one of Gehry’s
pipe dreams: receding chambers, curls, soft arches
cantilevers, like canvases unfolding to wind.
The dog stops dead on its tracks, sits
and gives a slant look that’s all dog candor
and nosiness. The embarrassed owner pulls.
The cellophane-wrapped jogger turns also.
Pure formalists, they are, the old folks,
focusing on the movement of an ostensible
form, a structure, something wrought within
and needing outing though it’s nothing like art,
just fending off stuff inside, cancers, heart attacks
in the slow-mo, real moves of fight and war.