It need not be a desiccated wreck 
of boards, completely uninhabited, 
adobe bricks regressed to mud, hay. Heck,

Any tree would seem to grieve,
what with the hawk lonelinessing
on her desiccated perch.

Always already, the word within the world.
So the spider spins the same web each morning
and you are born into meaning

who came whirling out of the North 
like a locust-swarm, storm-darkening the sky, 
their long hair whipping in the wind like the manes of horses, 

They won’t come to you. These nights, you could sit for a year
on the dock behind Arthur’s Gift Shop and General Store
before you’d spot with your flashlight

Possible to believe in a bearable sort of life
in a white room in one of the tidy anonymous streets
that flash by the elevated subway. Picture it:

The beautiful gray dog
loping across the lawn
all afternoon for the sheer

the farmer’s wife imagined she could hear them
slipping away like daughters
over the rough stone wall

When you set out to find your Northwest Passage
and cross to an empty region of the map

with a passionate desire to know what lies beyond,

      Leaping, you leave a fit of crystal
Rallying, in eddies, for the next disturbance.
     Startled lilies regain their delicate balance