Elegy

Somewhere a poem is waiting for me to write it in the jewelry box, coiled into an old ring or stopping the hands of a watch; in the vanishing barn risen to the top of the pail to be skimmed off; or in the tree outside engraving in green ink on the other side of a leaf. In my old room the white curtains blow like ghosts of themselves over the sill; under the bed misplaced words gather to grab my helpless ankle it is a poem the Child I was hides in the ear of the woman I have become a poem who's lines were the lines of my fathers' face.