An Excerpt from “In This Saying”

i
There is a way to end books;
the gathered papers, their weighty
gift—the clean parade of words

in columns of paragraphs and in columns
of images—the tidiness of things—
and numbered, they form the thing

you have labored over for years.
To end a book, you tie a blue ribbon
around the heft, make a bow, kiss it.

ii
The way to end the year of cataclysms
is to find a piece of land by water,
where old boats rot at the edges,

and the place smells of ancient things,
sulfur, salt, rotting fish,
and the deep musk of mud and grass.

To then sit on a moving jetty,
rocking against the universe’s
pulse, and there wait for the moon.