Extinctions

Rae Gouirand

 

 

Box as metaphor, bowl as metaphor,

one can’t help but compare—

 

—I look around my house

at what it contains, which is

 

mostly open things, cross

the valley I live in to find the place

 

endlessness reforms.

Words like precise for the one,

 

free for the other,

and as I put myself to sleep

 

it seems meaningful that I should

hold the two

 

in that kind of conversation

few living things accommodate:

 

incomplete, yet outside

of us enough, something of

 

our inward holds,

more parallel than comparable.