There is a pleasure
in lifting the lid and stirring
ham & split-pea soup
my wife has left simmering.
It draws me out of myself
to set whatever I’m doing

I walk around the living room
subvocalizing–poem composing.

My wife enters, folded laundry
in her arms. “Talking to yourself,”

1
The ends of weeks–
their mornings, middle hours.
Beginnings. Once
when I brought forgiveness
from my rock garden,
gone two years neglected:

I am reading Meng Hao-jan’s poems
and drinking the last of tea at twilight.

My wife, up from a late-in-the-day nap,
has taken the dog for her evening walk.

A common hairpin appears on my bathroom
tile floor. I bend to pick it up.
So out of season. She went away early fall.

It was a recurring dream.
Oedipal, said Freud.
Impossible, said God. I have neither father nor mother.
God called for Jung.
What did Freud say, asked Carl.

Light allowed in
through a dormer window.

Its insistence of radiance
fills the corner of the room,
back wall, stiff wimple.

A man says he carries letters
in Portland, Oregon.

Not that he is a letter carrier
or mailman,

but that he is “a man who carries
letters.”