Poem

Summer

When in pain it is easy to praise, in pauses,

easy to praise even the uncritical ants which labor

under the shadow of grass, tree, myself,

here in the courtyard of my old elementary school.

The small garden, the slab of shale

which bears the shrunken tread of dinosaurs,

which, as a schoolchild, I measured

in finger-widths, hoping some still lived,

in the world unmapped, as we hope as children,

before the consciousness

of our body’s scale, before we fill our skin

entire, when we could endure

without knowing we were tested.