When It Is Over it Will Be Over

     Pen and ink painting by Troy Passey of a line by
     Edna St. Vincent Millay


Hurricane of what must be
              only feeling, this painting's
sentence circling to black

on blank, ever-
              tightening spiral
of words collapsing

to their true gesture: meaning
              what we read
when not reading,

as the canvas buckles
              in the damp: freckled
like the someone

I once left sleeping
              in a hotel room to swim
the coast's cold shoals, fine veils

of sand kicked up by waves where
              I found myself enclosed
in light: sudden: bright

tunnel of minnows
              like scatterings of
diamond, seed pearl whorled

in the same
              thoughtless thought
around me: one column of scale

turning at a moment's decision,
              a gesture I
was inside or out

of, not touching but
              moving in
accord with them: they

would not wait for me, thickening
              then breaking apart as I slid
inside, reading me

for threat or flight by the lift
              of my arm, as all
they needed to know

of me was in the movement:
              as all this sentence
breaks down to Os and Is,

the remnants of someone's
              desires or mine so that
no matter if I return

to that cold coast, they will
              never be there: the minnows
in their bright spiraling

first through sight, then
              through memory,
the barest

shudderings of sense:
              O and I
parting the mouth with a cry

that contains—
              but doesn't need—
any meaning.





From Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.