Your Virtue Unswerving, But Miles from Any Mark

Skewered to a thicket, you sleep on a mattress

piled with straw while spiders

the one pot you find and kneel into another

morning, your fingers steadying

the pages for you often tremor, the guilt

forest-thick, your throat

might close forever if you sing that one

too many times. To whom?

The horseflies zipping the evening to shreds?

Forget this knock-kneed

metaphor of a cabin, a forest, your one pot

sunk in its lime rim—

Look at the lake, the water peeling toward us

like spoons, a ladder of light

and the fish in their soft armor, numb to a fear

of drowning, mouths agape,

searching the water’s mossen lid—to be so

dumbstruck is to really know God