MOST

For most of a winter, roughly, I’ve wandered between two poems

that don’t even exist. Nothing yet’s been written; no ideas yet. They’re

more what I can already sense before thinking, except for the one

thought, that I’ll build them eventually, that from high above they’ll

look a bit like two ponds – each in its way not glamorous and not

unglamorous – but like two forests also, between which a vast

pond like a sea shifts quietly. There were berries, and there were

bells that sounded like berries, pale pink in the otherwise

meant to happen happens. I’m a man at sea

on horseback again. Broken clouds

shadow the water.

 

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The Late Season

I tell my father I’m hurt,

that I feel sad, and he tells me

not to be, because already in the world

so much, he says, so much

sadness. It’s the late season;

the light falls differently.

He disappears again

into the dull background that,

whether or not he’s ever

wanted or now

regrets it, he seems to require,

for context, if nothing else,

like that mantis

whose camouflage involves

being indistinguishable

from an orchid once found

only in Southeast Asia, widely

exported now, common, as so much

seems to be, though not

privacy, anymore, and of

course, not shame either, which

maybe never did quite stop me

from causing damage; but I have

tried to think twice about it.