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

Stands white and alone
a question mark
at the end of summer

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 farmer’s wife imagined she could hear them
slipping away like daughters
over the rough stone wall

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

Among the sepals crisping
where they strain apart to show
tips of blushy petals getting set

In the stories that make us
             they wait mysterious
for us to sleep, & wake them

greener than Eden, a shock of bliss to see
just past the stew and suck of reeking waters,
the earth ate sunshine under the olive trees.