It’s not like I entered
the moon’s orbit.
Not like I discovered cricket science
or mouse culture.
It’s only that vestibule called the mind—echo chamber,
kiosk of chaos, cone of delusion—no escaping
this shaky barrier
of bones, though relief
efforts are under way.
If I am not reading the scrim
of the water’s surface
than I am telling fortunes in the alley, divining
my demise.
Look—I am a body, a brain, bag-o’-bits,
a ruse, redolent
with worry, bursting, near doom.
Think of the widow who ordered a staircase built
to a brick wall, the child who spins
solely for the purpose of falling. I too made myself
redundant, superfluous.
Wasn’t it always so?
The black stone carried back
from the Mediterranean—proof—a solid piece
of evidential matter—I convey,
therefore I am.
Woe all these digressions, the many-colored attempts
at evasion; this is my thicket,
my muddle,
my quagmire.
light to the dispelled night—
I watch the trillium grow,
occupy my head
with makeshift metaphors
and these three stations
of the cross: reverie, what if
and the frozen tundra of now.