You were very sorry for him, of course,
& of course you didn’t want to feel
resented. (And it’s not like he was
alive to resent it, or you.) You never told
that story again, nor spoke of him.
Nothing waspish about you then (or now):
rounded, oblique, static. Nothing to grasp,
and so I couldn’t grasp it, or you.
Perhaps it was neither death, nor a test.
No hard boundary to step over, nothing
to be dared. What are feelings, after all?
There was calculus to do and to be done.
You drew a square and sat inside it. Stayed
there for decades, unblinking, unchanged.

How can you love a fish? I wonder,
ascribe to it humor or kindness,
alone in its glass box where you
trapped it. No benevolent god, you,
though I suppose there is some
strange affinity to be found in
your mutual lidless stares. You
use to write about birds, their blue
& green plumage & their noisy
squawking. They’ve been replaced
by more solitary creatures: a fish
in a tank, one black cat riding a horse
along the shore to find a selkie & her
wheyish foot trailing salt into the sea.