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

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

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:

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

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

When you set out to find your Northwest Passage
and cross to an empty region of the map

with a passionate desire to know what lies beyond,

      Leaping, you leave a fit of crystal
Rallying, in eddies, for the next disturbance.
     Startled lilies regain their delicate balance

Surely we did not need this ( to see an inscrutable sky so
clearly) to consider God a base invention, a vile insinuation,
an impolite proposition, an attempt—alas, successful—at

It haunts us, the misappropriated flesh,
be it Pelops' shoulder after Demeter's feast
or Adam's rib supporting Eve's new breasts,