This far in—
where to say the sea
and mean impossible

makes sense,
why not—you can
almost forget

what brought you here,
the water it started with,
a life that has sometimes (admit

this much) seemed mostly
an only half-wanted because
finally unruly

animal you'd once hoped
to change by changing
its name: from If Only to

How Did I
to In Spite of Everything—
but nothing sticks, that doesn't

have to. Not memory;
not the naming—which, if a form of
remembering, is also

a form of to own, possession,
whose lineage
shifts never: traced

far enough, past hope, back across
belief, it ends always
at desire—without which

would there have been
imagination, would
there be folly,

one spreading itself
like a bay tree, the other
a green olive tree in the house

of God?
This far in the sky
is everything. Clouds cross it

like ships,
sheer will, regret
itself cut abruptly

loose. Lovely, when you say so,
—and when you don't.
It was never for you.