This, in my imagination, is the moment Robert Burns
turns to the life of poetry. —Nils Peterson
A Kind of Biography
All night the language dog
gnaws at the meaning bone.
Soon the sea begins
to question its shuffling
from East to West, and the stars
their vast, ordinary circuits.
So my friend has fled into his father’s fields.
He leans against a fence
and wonders what the ant means
and the moonlight grasses as they bend
and spread and flow beneath
a wind whose beginning seems obscure
and whose end, uncertain.
He notices that something of himself
has set off with the wind
and that he is now two.
He wonders at his doubleness.
Back home, he sits in the kitchen,
an ordinary boy watching
his mother cook breakfast,
but something of him is in
another place, and some other thing
Is with him even here.
by Nils Peterson
from The Dear Time of Our Talking
Frog On The Moon Press, 2020