I was on a train daily when all I could write
were trains, and when the air is thick with falling
leaves, they land in my every poem.
The world has so many faces, and each may seem
the whole while you stare, like a predator
making eye contact with the wings of a forest moth.
Every molecule’s a chapel for something
you could reduce by naming God.
We only know this mystery in turns,
one scene at a time, and never complete.
It could be design, or we could find ourselves
so narrow by chance.
Some sequence of genes might precipitate
a surveyor who’d know the whole for whatever it is.
It may have been attempted, and why not
many times?
But I would guess these victims of supreme knowledge
went fatally insane bottling the cosmos in their skulls.
However it came to be, this dumbshow
with reality’s shadow,
I think it’s a grace.
It’s raining outside, the first rain in weeks,
and I’m at the window of a coffee shop along train tracks.
If I could see this moment whole, I doubt I’d bother
to notice the rippling light in these puddles.
These pools of distorted sky can seem something like angels
filling me with something like a vision.
