I leave me out
in an open hypothesis,
my face uncomely graffiti
up a factory smokestack,
the autumn wind singing
through my chest;
Cosmos plucking a jolly tune
on the ribs
while the clumsy old toad bounces
around
in that dark, moist confinement
under my breath

A minuscule, winged insect
touches down
on a rising page
in David Hinton's ”The Wilds of Poetry”
up before me,
so little I can't see it very well

It runs hither & thither
among the letters,
jumping proficiently like a hurdler
across sentence fences

I am careful
to keep the volume ajar,
not to crush the undefined little fellow
in its wicked speed reading

- and suddenly it is gone,
flown off
into the enormity of the tiny eastern bedroom
in Niemisel's mid-September 66°N / 22°E,
where I share the night
with a gang of turgid red & green Capsicum annuum
(bell peppers) plants
that we've just moved in from the garden
in view of the expected first frost

I feel their wavy personalities,
sense their kind,
as I move the place marker
a few pages ahead,
put down the book
at the summit of the bedside stack
and sail off
on The Great Ship of Dreams,
too much age stapled to the hull