Doty, excerpt from "The Wings"

If endlessness offered itself to me today

I don’t think I’d have done anything

differently.  I was looking out the car window

at the unlikely needlepoint wild asters made

of an October slope, blue starry heads

heaped upon each other, too wet and heavy

with their own completion to stand.

I didn’t even stop, but that brief

yellow-eyed punctuation in a field

gone violet and golden at once,

sudden and gone, is more than I can say.

There’s simply no way to get it right,

and it was just one thing.  Holsteins,

a little down the road, paraded

toward the evening’s expected comforts;

two cats in the long grass

observed.  By a rowboat-sized pond

one slanting ram floated on the thinnest legs.

There were geese.  There were:

the day’s narration is simple assertion;

it’s enough to name the instances.

Don’t let anybody tell you

death’s the price exacted

for the ability to love;

couldn’t we live forever

without running out of occasions?

Mark Doty