Why should I want to return
to a time where even when I occupied that time

You, Lord, are my shepherd, imagination
figment; I seek you in patterns of Thanks-
giving tablecloths and in a bristling-

Past perfect—mode of leaving well enough alone,
                as in he had been here but left:

Afraid is not the word,
though I’d rather be quick-witted
than kind in a world that divides evenly

Workers, soldiers, slaves,
all the trappings of royalty and agriculture.

The auditorium has been waiting
for what seems like years,

Reading? Morning.
Reading morning and a sky like the olive.

The diplomat’s daughter, that straw girl with a shock mouth
and bed-me eyes at eleven, was going back to Norway
end of March. How we ribbed her that her voice was so low;

I see New Englandly, and the miles gauged in the end are my own
Thousand footsteps measured warily around the sinking neck

          Along with the moths tonight, love runs into the windowpane.
         (“Turn off the light or we’ll have no peace.”)
         No, not love, a mere inkling; love itself is beyond reach. Far