Look at a River, Elisa

Look at a painting of sky. Look 

a long time and notice one thing.

How someone’s wet eye stares back

like a vortex in the stream. 

There’s always a point when

the day skips, if I remember it at all,

so nothing came before the 

smudge of paint, the false door. 

In the novel I’m reading, a cowboy 

dies, dies, of snakes in a river. 

He was really a boy, a child

who cried and sang Irish lullabies. 

Look at a detail hold on the surface, 

look until it folds in and under. 

We die, we die, not over and over

but twice, the infinite we know.