this is the track I’ve had on REPEAT all afternoon:    she is butterfly
brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono

                            if I were foolish like her:
                                         but aren’t I foolish like her
                            spotting the coil of smoke and the billowed sail
           against the verge of sky

simple on the rise surveying the anchorage:     simple me, signal me
dreading the confident assumption of return, dreading more
uncertain tone to come, the thinning notes, performance
too close to my own impatient—swells, a surge:      sick wind

but the emotion is, after all, an artfully conjured gesture
arranged marriage between a past ache and frail woodwinds
                              I could skip ahead
                                            could break the inconsolable loop
of harbor, waiting, overlook, waiting, inevitable waning eye

troubled robins, once more in the handkerchief trees
once more, brief aquarelle of triplet lilies, blue as willowware
in that interval before his embrace falters, stuck, founders
             [shuffle play]    such a pitch of tenderness in the voice
                            such an awful lot of noise