Or it wasn’t people who left you wading this frigid
separateness, though loss might be parsed as such and
their addresses, scribbled in a workbook’s back pages,
seem one poured-over formula for reaching elsewhere’s
essence. Wrongheaded. This jay, though, bobbing into pooled
water where the garden tap leaks, English china blue-white
of its wings and tail, or talons palsied round power line
where it crosses the trellis like brittled grey rag-coils of last
season’s grapevine; unhaunted cock of its head looking up, back,
behind, through you to where the lime sheen of three fruit flies
confabbing on warm porch wood completes a dizziness, an abundance
of goings-on that have vowed to be piercingly not you. Obstinate
unlikeness: the hornet’s wing a maple key that never was
a hornet’s wing.
Or how you stared at a plate-load of skeleton — sticklebacks grilled
with garlic and lemon — as conversation dolphined up from a lull,
grinned,
then plunged back into the ring of drunk friends leaving you
tranced still, stuck in that pile of charred Cyrillics, or scintilla, maybe,
of an ongoing feast offered to Tacitus. Fish with its mouth stitched
shut. We never come round from this coma of looking.