in fog is a square of gray, blank canvas, cream from a sorrowful cow.
The foghorn lows mournfully, what else? Clytemnestra. No one listens,


and she’s always right. Exhausting to know so much dull information, 
useless until it finds its listener. Inert. This morning I walked an empty


wharf before the sun was up. A hungry gull looked me over as meat,
in beak-sized chunks, assessed my empty hands, considered my utility


from every angle—parts, conveyor, carrion—found nothing of interest.
It is easy to make peace with such appraisals, delivered without rancor.


Even the unseen hands of capital and human carelessness don’t carry
the shiv of family, of words crafted to enter the body just so, angled


to miss bone and find that intimate organ, faithful as weather, beating.
Wonder also fissures along such paths, lightning through sand, fingers 


of glass left of the flood. It hasn’t been written what this day shall be. 
Field birds counterpoint the tide as it sounds the rocks. Let me be 


the praising creature, the one who mourns the extinction 
of a single wave. Let me have a use
                                                                        and a life worth grieving.