Markets 
full of brown eggs 
and pale girls. 

Nights cold, 
short walk 
by improvised light. 

What you want the years 
to look like 
in hindsight: 

rain country, inertia, 
stems pushing 
past the sound. 

*

An archipelago 
of marooned 
individuals—

I recognized their kind 
everywhere I went.

Everyone wishing 
to be prized, 
then differently. 

On the one hand, 
desire, on the other—

*

But hindsight’s 
a danger 
to adoration,

the sheen 
of what’s unsaid 
and later seen.

*

Tonight, 
I have borrowed 
your imagination.

The garden, 
modest like the books 
you favored.

Even that square of dirt 
meant something 

I could never mean 
to you: such work 
to understand it.

*

Love without traction, 
the telegraph knows, 
its flicker and imperative.

The fair-haired children 
under the trees, 
not ours, not ours, you see.