yesterday’s threshold, and looking not
so much back as in, as if leaning into
a room in an art gallery, and seeing a painter’s

obsessive variations on a flower in
a clear glass vase, or on a tree, or on
a vegetable or animal or human face—what

is a vegetable face? Nothing isn’t
impossible, and it’s miraculous—its eyes
can feel what I can’t see. Now I can’t

explain how weeping will become the willow
where I plant my feet that want to sever
the root of all time, the heart of all time

roughly on the same level as my elbows
when my arms were as if at my sides
as I as if walked out of an art gallery,

bravely, into a room with framed and empty
windows, with traces of one transformation
of a flower, its trunk as thin as a stem, its