To get started I will accept
anything that occurs to me.
	—William Stafford

But what happens when nothing occurs
to you, just your black and gray reflection
in a kitchen window, an older self

you otherwise haven’t yet conjectured?
With the panes clean and the outside
winter world predictably darker 

than at this same time yesterday,
the double exposure you could call
Haggard Face over Exterior Scene

is like Community Ed. photography,
amateur-hour art work, a first-ditch effort
to mean something significant.

But then the dark subsides,
the framed face fades,
and there is just that world.
                        

I’ve a vague idea how they ended up
these two hundred lovely feet from shore,
this side of the tall double panes, veering

over the owners’ photos propped on a mantle,
over an old golden retriever twitching now
on his sheepskin rug. So I doubt it was due

to the wrenching updraft depicted
in their implausible contortions, the bunched
shoulders of their posed wings.

As mild chili simmers and Mozart saws
an easy soundtrack, they strive flat
against fine brick, forever matching

their sapphire chevrons, the shriveled
orange leaves of their feet. Meanwhile,
the drake’s clamped beak and his

wild dark eye seem to be carving
today’s northwest wind as if to permit
his trailing hen her subtle luxury

of squinting—as if, in wrestling her fixed
pin of fate, she entertains the greatest questions:
Why are we here? Where are we going?

Will we ever arrive? And, in a far softer thought
that has me perched on this hearthside chair,
my ear tiptoed to her dusty brain:

Why does it have to be me?
                        

Thank god, if that’s who’s to thank,
for this open territory called lost.

Found right now would mean
everything’s precisely the way

it’s apparently supposed to be. I’ve
been there! And I know you were

watching me watching my every
treacherous step, dragging along

that narrow sledge of expectations,
because I happened to see you too—

the chafing around your blue-white
wrists, your neck, the disjointed gaze

in your conversation, those nerves
you couldn’t seem to push aside

too often—there, where the questions came
as tepid waves and our answers met

with all those nodding heads. I’m sorry
I didn’t see to take your trembling hand.

Should I have felt it reaching when I
slipped forever from that room? Oh,

I was in such a rush to get myself lost,
with this just luckily coming next.

And now, how about you?
Yes, what about you?