Lines

*

I did not have exactly a way of life

but the bee amazed me and the wind’s plenty

was almost believable. Hearing a magpie laugh

through a ghost town in Wyoming, saying Hello

in Cambridge, eating cheese by the frothy Rhine,

leaning from plexiglass over Tokyo,

I was not able to make one life of all

the presences I haunted. Still the bee

amazed me, and I did not care to call

accounts from the wind. Once only, at Pompeii,

I fell into a sleep I understood,

and woke to find I had not lost my way.

-from Person to Person

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