An Optimism

It is morning. Remember that.

It is morning and the house is quiet,

so quiet that I can, for the moment, set myself

to wandering. I can sit patient at the door.

I can beg and bang to be let in. I am

turning this way and that. I am circling

the hole in the world of my imagination.

Let me in. I am saying the words, predictable

as any key—when I was a child,

when my mother, when the swarm of bees,

when I spent my days in mud among

the worms, rushing down the hill, our flooding

yard, when Hannah’s brother, her mother,

when I was too unclean, too wild a thing,

when I was barred from, when I sat alone

in the snow behind her house, pristine,

when, briefly, J and I were, when we

flew darkly down the green suburban

street, when he loved me, or something

in me and I loved the wind between us,

our bloody knees, when I think back, I am

nearly always otherwise alone, though

I never was alone, child of the salamanders,

child of the morning snow, the shamefaced

leaves. All my life, certainly for as long

as I’ve known I had a life, I was

like the sparrow right now outside

my window, flying headfirst, incessantly,

into what must seem, to her, like sky.

All around me people moved and laughed

and seemed, from where I fell,

to understand some silent thing,

some secret word that made itself

no home in me. Aggrieved, the world

of other people. I let it go.