The poet sat and counted up the lines

The poet sat and counted up the lines
of the song despite a terrible mania;
he thought about the quatrain as a shrine
where the bodhi tree is doing yoga.

The subtle way the tired Sun shines
between the gross branches of a sutra
reminded him of her clothes: the refined
tapestries that seemed from another era.

By the time he reached the number nine
he felt the heft of modernity that Kafka
knew, then battled the existential rhymes
and thundered into a confusing volta.

But this form is a strange web of time
and space, and the ever-elusive aura
is not something that we easily find
in the concrete systems of a stanza.