Tuesday afternoon, I may
sit with Mary Oliver at the ivy-laced
table where the garden
descends into wilderness.

She would explain the far-slung
call of geese, or faint spider-web
paths through the forest or,
perhaps, where in the tree
she hides her pencils – by root,
under limb? And occasionally we may fall
into a dewdrop silence,
where the only words spoken are
whispers from the woods.

Or, Friday night, at some single-
digit hour, when light clings to
the silhouette of a broken bartender
and skates along the lined glasses,
I may discover Billy Collins
in the shadowed corner, retelling a story –

sweet hints of humor, but laden
with the tragedy of an unoccupied barstool,
the discarded newspaper, or

when night is softest,
sometime between Wednesday and Thursday,
on some forgotten field listening to Rilke:
his voice lifted, the surreal
rustlings of German like
the touch of poison ivy to skin,
words blooming and crystallizing
in the emptiness between the stars,
an umbrella over the occasional plane
wandering into the zodiac. And so many others
to carry by embrace, to understand

that a poet is not a creator,
but a listener, one
who watches and waits
like October's feigned slumber; one who,
rarely, may hold a shadow of the world
in a sentence's confines.