For the Mountain Laurel, and: O sea: (That is to say:)

For the Mountain Laurel

Here's what to admire: how it thriveson adversity, accepts its condition of want,and greens. Makes a limber bark, makes bright

ecliptic little coronated flowers. And speaksin the vernacular register: a watershed.In downpours, a verdant shelter: sheds water.

Canny scantling. It's good at what it's good at.I'm trying hard to clear my head, to thinkwithout language, to remember that whole life

before the adjective. Don't forget: the shadow movesmore than you move, and intends less. Overhead,contrails sinter where jets just passed, just ice

windblown like seed where stars are what belongs.

O sea: (That is to say:)

Little bodies of unlikelihood, these wordsand spaces laid among the words. Think of it:one person botches the gender of a Spanish door, anothersees a little harbor; sailboats bob without significanceat their moorings, a couple on the wharf weighlobster against burgers for dinner. Not the threshold,not the frame in which the lover stands, breeze, curtain,sun, the sun-faded blue paint, case-hardened, crazed,the room one's in, the long room one will enter.