A Song for Forgetting

—after John Haines

1.

Unlike you, I can’t touch the moment I

saw myself as self first. I don’t know when I came

into the sense that I was alone, built of thoughts too

scattered to whisper, right here, only this,

I never believed that anywhere anyplace,

owed me anything, not explanation, not a

definition. You see, young

women don’t get to define “human,”

at least not the way the oldest spruce, green

despite the white and

dark, gets to define lonely.