As the channel of your personal death angles off
from the main river, cuts in relentless and deepends,
slicing through the banks like a great cleaver,
screeching off the flinty, buried stone, and then tumbling
you without direction or warning into broad and unsusupected pools,
dissipating like the merest eddy in the smooth depths
so once more you're thinking it's this one,
in this will be the end of time, the end of flow,
but it never is for at the last intolerable
moment of ending breath, the flat line of forever,
you burst, somehow, to the surface, to those wheeling
and fragmented surfaces where you bob up,
are pulled back under, again and yet again
till at last an unfelt current drags you
out to where the water becomes ragged on its own,
is a living place once more and as you are rubbed
and laved in the soothing wet there come
those curious crystalline glimpses of your life in frames
real instants starkly caught, clear
in the glare that flows along the line of the cliffs
but without a content, no indication of getting there,
framed in the unearthly colors of dreams
growths meant to be fruit-bearing
the ends of branches teased by huge, unopened buds
but always held there, never to be unwrapped,
ripened, mellowed dropped complete beneath the sun.

These moments of turbulent vision can forced you far
from your way without disabling the guidance centers
that still head you surely home the only thing remotely new
the shufflinf, the tiredness that living sleep has lost its power to dissolve
but otherwise you slide quite easily along the edge of woods
you're thinking of investing in with some consortium,
auspicious time for timber, as your broker says,
then over a path through a brown and weedy field
just the shape and the size, perhaps, for an upscale (thematic?) mall
and through the gate at the bottom of your yard
with a weary pause to evaluate your latest version of a garden
and deciding it's time to call in the pros of vegetables,
into the kitchen, windows heavily steamed from cooking–
for no reason this time you smear crude stick figures on the runny damp
amazed again at how even a line can look so human:
if you add a proper mouth it might just be worth talking to
though not sure you're ready for what windows have to say.

Ready or not, for a moment the childish drawing,
seen in this perspective,
forms part of a whole new personal landscape,
fraught with new weather, galled by new laws.
These figures are suddenly as essential as glass
to these windows, shapes that can open,
lengthen at will but with no will to give them any attitude
but their own as they taught, flaunt
the circumspections endemic to your accustomed view.