Why didn’t you take a photograph
out the window of every place you ever stayed?
Clotheslines, balconies, food vendors,
could have focused on any one thing.
But I was lingering at the dock fascinated
by a seagull with a hopping gait.
Catching the breeze.
Scrap of pink ribbon,
yellow shovel half-buried in sand—
Or a picture of every classroom you inhabited,
even for an hour, the boy who said,
“I’m afraid I’m in love with the word lyrical,”
on a hundred-degree day,
pencil swooping across page.
He looked like the toughest customer in town
till he said that.
To wake with a word Bundle
tucked between lips, and wonder all day
what it means . . . bundle of joys, troubles . . .
each day the single mystery-word could change.
Veil. Forget. Abandon.
And consider the people at any crossing walk,
how you will never cross with them again,
isn’t that enough to make a charm?
Or the careful ways we arrange a desk
wherever we stay,
temporary landscape—pencils, sharpener,
drifting moon of a cup over everything, silent and humble, bearing its own hope.