On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching

          By then, of course, they’d done plenty in the name

of recklessness — their word as well, though incorrect,

for wilderness. Ah, scutchweed, rushlightitude, if not,

why not, strowbegone, nor sheep, fa la, shall

          graze. The way, incredibly, for most it’s still enough

to have noticed a similar weather pattern between

regret and the windy plains of remorse, like that must

make them the same, or should, or at least no more

different than a fetish for being eaten alive and

whole is, apparently, from the desire to leave loneliness

          behind forever — a reasonable desire, I suppose, but

in the end a useless one, since actual loneliness isn’t

leavable: love distracts from loneliness, it doesn’t

crowd it from view    ...    some could almost see this,

eventually; others chose not to. Some — the luckiest — 

          arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where

to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,

or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl

before them, one after the other, each a seemingly

vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about,

          not anymore, they agreed

it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was

was their own.