He’s come to the beginning of the end
Of the poem, the moment when he turns
To place the first of its words on paper.

          Along with the moths tonight, love runs into the windowpane.
         (“Turn off the light or we’ll have no peace.”)
         No, not love, a mere inkling; love itself is beyond reach. Far

These holiday mornings when nobody
gets up at the right time to do what they do
so there’s nothing out there if you’re the one

Nothing alive can keep us as we go.
The end loves all the doors that close away.
We may embody what we never know.

Sometimes love’s vagrancy (whatever you call it) 
overwhelms all but the most robust subscribers, 
and, dishonest as it may sound, the whole cramped enterprise 

It is hard not to look down from these heights
on the unfeeling flatlands
of southeast Hagerstown, its minor-league

Why should I want to return
to a time where even when I occupied that time
I wanted to go back to another time

have never known starvation nor plenitude
and unless the order of the world 
changes, I won’t. 

I want to wake her, run to greet her,
even if she were dead a hundred years
and showed herself as no more than a shadow

Past perfect—mode of leaving well enough alone,
                as in he had been here but left:
                flat hand of what can’t be undone now—