It isn’t worth our while to fret about
our excellence or impotence in art.
I would have liked to be wilder, bolder,

Scourging the sea with rods
To punish it for what it has engulfed.
Or running naked with your bronzed friend

a few feet about the sunken green bank
where a man used to sit and think

Rain putters down on the wood shingles overhead,
now smattering heavily, becoming
a language I think I will learn one day

another lifetime is up for us,
another life is upon us.

the flock shifts weight like a snowplowing skier
and turns, and yahonks and spirit-cries
toward that flow of light spelled into its windings

always
to someone
for the first

So this is it, this is you. The eyes are melting
in the white clouds, it is love, love that cuts us

A woman with a sickle creeps up the hill
as she did a thousand years ago

What did she know about Africa
Were there lakes like this one
with a rowboat pushed under the pier?