There's a cold chill in the air and the crows are indifferent. As long as
croissants fall from gloved hands, my friends satiate. The beautiful waste
keeps the landing fed. Each clay tile on a partial roof collects five minutes
in the sun in exchange for an hour of warm. I want to write excellent poetry,
the kind of poems that a person would carry around in their mind after
the carving, having calved like a glacier, leaving part of the self in the poem's
sea. Instead, I look out the window and watch the faces of the people walking
past. All that past only lives on as a future in my eyes for a few seconds.
The wind ruffles redwood hair and says: You will write, but this will not be
the poem that changes your life. All right then. Life remains attached to this
old trunk, bare on the southwest side where a sibling used to stand. What
would you say, dad, to all these words? What would you say to all that
extirpated ambition? Perhaps all my wondering keeps my maples
making syrup all year long. O natural sugars, can you suggest a
more honorable life? And why does nobility echo in my weak
mind, wringing its delicate fingers nearly off of its willow
hands? Are you still with me? What is second person to
you? It surely overvalues the first, in that pre-
Copernican way that makes a given mind
consider its own mind the center of all
the cosmos. Persons, then. And to
refute anthropocentrism, minds.
And really, objects. And perhaps
more truly, relations and their
relations.
Roman Ryan 