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

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

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:

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

Every night they went a little farther.
Restless, too hot to sleep
under the too-bright quilts she had made as a girl