In the eye of a milder storm off the sewage
plant, we paused on the path, looking
into the tea-coloured river at a starburst
of minnows, a moving model
of sperm head-butting the floating ovum of a bread crust.
On this bank, a man fishing snagged
and began conducting — the far shore’s
foliage, metal-glint sparrows in flight,
gnats in the tree shade — to a rising
crescendo nobody heard.
A child, deep
in the reeds, found a shoe and a mattress and seemed pleased.
The branches, sifting the light, bristled
in an orgy of larvae that dripped. Wild
chicory and brown empties bowed their heads at an old fire
pit, while a night heron on deadwood
stalked nothing forever.
Before coming
across that snake near the picked-cleaned skull of a muskrat
I wanted the things I saw to appear as they’d been intended,
to see myself in the settings, even off to the left, but proportional,
the way one can look into a landscape and feel needed, compositionally
rooted, turning away, reclining in the chilled ultraviolet —
Not this panic of change, of things shedding the skin of themselves
to emerge into each moment as versions of things, still stitched
to their shadows, and gaping, and blind. No arrangement felt true
enough to be held, to be fixed in memory for a time when I wasn’t —
So I married myself to fair guesses, maintained a safe distance
from you and watched, and walked on like a man with a future.