Tell me the one about again.
I can stare if you're speaking.
In "the world awaits you" the subject
is the world. Again, a mendicant,
seeking the way, begs off
across the way. Bows down
for a count. Dawn draws its draw-
strings in. Again, to sway.
To sway you, here is a fountain
boxed in winter so no snow mars
its jets. Behind my house
here is a barn much larger than
my house, its door
torn open like your letter, love.
Dew on the snow, steams. Cheekline
backlit. As everything made an example of.
“Mobile made of parts of cloud.”
“Suicide note on marquee of abandoned cinema.”
I won’t say we were in many
ways like retirees, though one
problem of time is before I froze
up on the radio I said perfectly
to myself everything I wanted
to say on the radio yet needed
to say it again, as to explain to you
why not a cliché even as I realize
everything verges to convention,
signalling various upholding sufficiencies
we need to keep making exist, similar
to the way the consolation of not
feeling as much yourself is empathy,
which is synonymous with art, you
have said, and similarly in this whole city
flavored with shrimp this page
is already becoming less extant
with each finished word yet more
immortal by bounds than I. Well, aren’t I
as one wearing the waiter’s clothes
because he spilled on me and they insisted,
I have heard of doors before but
would now like to see you framed
by one, or passing through it, though I know
drawing with water on a stone continuously
tracing your picture as it dries is at once
a symbol of eternity and of time’s
terminal slog, much as the continuous tenuous
falling gold leaves seem now solely
aspects of vision or the general air
Zach Savich's first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He has recent poems in Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets 2008.