How can the frost-tinged narcissus not ring
with some echo of what I am feeling?
How can it remain undivided in its loyalty to this world
when the perfect weather of the self beckons,
the isolation of consciousness whirling its own cyclones,
creating its own moon and sun, Ganymede and Io?
Feeling the rock of the planet revolve beneath my feet
I ground myself, I root and identify:
hominid, middle-sized, midcontinent, midlife.
And then the fish of the self swallows the lure
and runs line off the reel like a blood-red balloon
careening its string among these naked elms.
Like reading Rilke as the snow comes down
past the streetlight in the alley, a magical theater,
a dome of sacred inconsequence, the world
moving through its circle of illumination and passing on
as snow, falling. Still falling. Then fallen.