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To be, so unlike another
Discomfited in a room where I
have never been nor will ever be.
No lace. No flowers. Unrecognizable
to myself. Yet bending
to sit in your imagined chair
by your particular window.
Mountain witness, sea air. A series
of paintings in red and blue by Hokusai.
How much useless effort I have spent
climbing into that chair.
Or marching against the wind
of your breath, not floating in it.
I accept at last my discomfiture
with myself, with you; never mind,
and run alone through slats of sun
with cavorting birds who are anything
but silent. Free to say that I want to love
myself the way I want you to love me:
Under song. In and out of tree-stripe
shadows, one limb after another.
As far as the sun’s eye sees along
a flat land where orange hawkweeds
swell in the random mist of spider laces.
In the morning. In the morning.
May 2012
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