The elation of naming, that dispassionate
stance, of course it could not last. As all

After washing your face and leaving it
in the basin of water from which it stared
up at you as you left the room,

I have seem them growing wild by the hundreds
along a riverbank on a Pacific island.
As I dipped my oars silently so as not to frighten

The doors have been removed from their hinges
and the windows are boarded up
in anticipation of the hurricane

In the Kyi Valley of Tibet, a snow-white desert
where an orchestra of lamas performs by starlight for the gods,
it is said that when we near death, and may least suspect it,

As if we arrived through the blind extremes
of sleep, we opened our mouths, eyes closed,
and the priest laid on our tongues his coins

Who’s to say where the man ends,
the world begins; what it is
that wakes him in a visible sweat,

Once a child’s poem began a pond of time
what followed must have flowed from what a child

How different any house looks from outside
and from within. I used to circle mansions
finding out, through guessing and good luck,

Across my work yard the bones lie,
a rubble in crests and waves, piled
white, grooved brown, ocean to ocean—