Insistent day seeks my attention, asks
me to notice with sun & song. A bird

alights on a branch. I wish I were that small.
Chemical grief sits at all my junctions

& waits to strike. Each hour unwinds with slow
-moving nonpotential. The deep of joy

seems so removed from times I know should be
suffused with love. Still—even with the world’s

sad undoing, this place is where I find
& know all life’s pleasures. How’s that for love?

With every thought, a blue vortex of sounds
that catalogue & crescendo in me:

the white-crested waves; the shimmer of wind
through unnamed trees; the starling, the starling—