While we were waiting for the movie to begin,
my wife caught up with her old friend Maryann,
and because I could only make out every
third or fourth word, my attention fluttered off
in search of something else and landed on
the thirty-five-ish couple sitting three rows
in front of us—the backs of their heads

Weeks after her death I came to the garden window
to marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scattering
past the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.
Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.

Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-
clicking machines, he sleeps
in a bed in a room not his own.
People enter and pass like ghost-blown
fogs. He is a slow walk
with limbs that recently gave way.
He is part of the blue snowfall.

It’s a strange place
             to try & find
God—inside

I am learning how to sleep
             again, to love
the descent, or is it,

lying here, a rising up
             to summit
where sleep wanders

after an oil painting by Peter Doig

As is always the case with Doig, we are on the inside.
Outside, this time, is a coast we all know.
The view is ideal: the day has reached an end,
the water is mostly still, and the moisture in the air
makes every light into a star.

PUGIN
I was reading a biography of Pugin. Architecture
was how Pugin avoided God.
This much is evident. When he slipped out at night
to drift down to the water he was a smoke.
He did not look up at the moon. We can be sure
that any bargain he made was intentional
especially those he bound in straps made of snow.