A Great Thing that Happened

Or maybe it's still
happening, still
water. My poem, these days,
is very little more than family. It inks out
in ankles and smiles, the sometimes spilled
milk of a morning, a lark. I'm speaking less
metaphorically than I ever have, this poem.
It does that too
to the man who writes it. Once
I would have called it a metaphysics,
but that would have been a name
slapped on a thing
from a position of naivety. Slugging it
in
or on, a bad badge.

So what does this have to do
with Frank O'Hara and Wisława Szymborska
and Mary Oliver? Only that
I went out looking for people,
poets really, who try like hell
to give the right names to things.
Who don't gussy things up.
Who, sure, organize them
and spin them through poetic organs.
Whatever, and regardless, they

get me back to the -- I'm
so out of practice I don't
really know how to say it --
grace of all stuttured light

that,
in lifting me up,
made me feel like I was
falling. What a wrong,
truly wrong
way to claim
feeling. Forget
feeling, then, a feeling
I keep
coming back to:
the quality of time,
the quality of time,
oh the quality of one's time.

Whether familying or
quite alone, keep telling myself,
reach out for the forks and spoons,
the edges of bookshelves, the
tiny hands, the large hands,
and stop being so consumed
with controlling the narrative.

Try this: you are a single strand
of golden thread,
or something like that,
in the garment on which
they rest their head.

Or this: each moment is fire
and its opposite. Each moment
is unconquerable
by metaphor. Try thanking,
thanking, thanking, thanking
goodness.