How Do We Name This
Like a bird fills a tree, then empties it, glass
of sweet green water, light comes from the dark
pockets the birds make
—If instead I could worship
the tired boats that meander like dogs near death, and what
if I could? These beautiful dogs are dead. These dogs
make beautiful dead. The fog lusts for the open sky
and takes it from us. It does not descend like a bird, it is a boat
taking flight in the ascension of a storm, the kind we saw coming
but found ourselves stronger than, that our anticipation
was as meaningful as the defeat, the dispossession of it.
That they were the same.
And I, too, quite me-like,
wept not for the loss but for the never-having-had—
memory of having had a memory once, like flour,
once so held, now patches of white on the stove
that cannot be retrieved. I have begun to see visits
from my friends as holes into which memory will step—
that that which I look at now, the turn of a head like a wave
completing itself over another wave, or a shoe kicking off the foot—
these, the makings of future grief,
the motion into which sweet things move, then still,
wait to be moved again onto the floor beneath
the table’s dark wood-grain. A table which had to kill a tree to be made.
