I found it, slack
and powerless and belly-up.
How came it to be there?

         Whatever is expressive 
about clumsiness (bad knees), 
        disproportion (potbelly, 

Not the abrupt way, frozen
In the one glance of a painter’s frame,
Christ in the doorway pointing, Matthew’s face

Shadows from the spruce woods slouch down the hill,
the windmill’s crippled shadow
pierces the house, a blue fog spirits

A world already named, already deposed
in the urge of his stressed
consonants, vowels slack:

the uncanny ability, a special dance, a mind on safari, 
the scent of blossoms, the foraging flight, the uncanny 
ability, to cling, to find, to fly into a mind on safari,

Nothing moves.
There is an amazing silence.
I become large and bored with sitting here.

I could not speak the name of the place,
the stone building that gave
more silence to the field.

Becoming eighty
Might be nothing much
If I could be well,

There is a thin glass
Between me and everything I see.
The glass is pain.