I Carried Your Name Four Years First

one spring, i won a pile of books
which i did not read, but kept

and carried from state to state,
four years later i found a poet

who crawled inside of me and sat down
on a cool stone veined with evergreen leaves

near white water
to tell me of all the things i ought to admit about myself,

i watched him pound them out of the boulder
with a chisel of marble he said he found in Greece

with the woman who'd wrote the poetry
i did not read,

after he waded into the river
having warned me he wouldn't return,

i opened one of the pile:
For Jack Gilbert

It Was Like Being Alive Twice