he would greet the sound as only another mystery he cannot obey—

a command neither canter nor carrot,

though almost familiar, almost a thing he can taste.

I IMAGINE MYSELF IN TIME

I imagine myself in time looking back on myself—

this self, this morning,

drinking her coffee on the first day of a new year

and once again almost unable to move her pen through the iron air.

Perplexed by my life as Midas was in his world of sudden metal,

surprised that it was not as he’d expected, what he had asked.

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,

what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,

I whose choices made her what she will be?

THE MEETING

The rat was fat and healthy and equally surprised,

almost insulted. Leaving only because I was larger

but renouncing no claim.

As I, at times, have looked my fate in the face

and acknowledged nothing.

Continued as if I could, as if this life were mine to choose,

and I the unquestioned lord of my basement kingdom

with its single, high, and unwashed corner window.

WANTING MORE AND MORE TO LIVE UNOBSERVED, UNOBSERVING

Wanting more and more to live unobserved,

unobserving,

like a dog who takes the bone and goes to another room

where it just fits under the low-legged table or couch.

In the farthest depths, no sunlight reaches.

Yet certain fish, now eyeless, streak with luminescence

when excited;

a lowered bathysphere turns on a floodlight

and is mobbed, the strange-formed bodies drawing in for miles.

No one was ever meant to see this.

Certainly not the fish, who see nothing, whose

tentacles travel the cold light, and no one knows how or why.

Like human beings to a mystery

they imagine feels some passion for their fate.

And the dog? Fallen into the marrow-pleasure completely.

THE DESTINATION

I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it.

Irremediable rock of refusal, this world thick with bird song,

tender with starfish and apples.

How calming to say, “Turn right at the second corner,”

and be understood,

and see things arrive as they should at their own destination.

Yet we speak in riddles—

“Turn back at the silence.” “Pass me the mountain.”

To the end we each nod, pretending to understand.

LATE SELF-PORTRAIT BY REMBRANDT

The dog, dead for years, keeps coming back in the dream.

We look at each other there with the old joy.

It was always her gift to bring me into the present—

Which sleeps, changes, awakens, dresses, leaves.

Happiness and unhappiness

differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one of pressed tin,

this painting proposes.

Each carries the same water, it says.

RYOANJI: AN ASSAY