Round
By James Hoch
Perhaps you covet something of
its emptiness, its uselessness
in matters of yearning or feeling
another’s yearn, that it can’t
know a damn thing, yet damns
everything it touches: the water
it gathers along its passage,
the air it pushes through,
swallow-like. It is no bird,
though you envy the song
you hear only after it’s gone,
even if it sings through paper,
a goat, the neck of a man
wearing a scarf that tufts just as
the rest of him flies out of
his shoes and collapses in dirt.
Or, how it is like the dirt
receiving him, the privilege
of not knowing if he was
kind or unkind, as you
chamber another, waiting for
someone to come for his shoes.
