ISSUE: Autumn 1984
Late afternoon, the eight-chimneyed building
across the yard, clock on its gable,
lights up, as if with fire, in every window.
An excess: the sky is still light,
or almost light, and something about
that light, the white trim, the slate
gray roof, the air itself, the lucent sky,
seems single, almost a surface you could polish.
I have never felt empty.
Once, when I was a child,
I felt too full, and sometimes at night.
Now this light, this stranger light,
so different from everything else
it seems the same—
Walking around the world this way,
as if a world were being made—
Nothing slips through the net, falls from the basket.
The earth, inside its porous skin, is whole.
