The Light from Canada

               after Schuyler

Falls over the brushed steel
of Ontario and Eerie, rises where the floes
fracture and dissolve.

Is it true that the first things we read and feel
never leave our vocative?
A darkling thrush, a darkling plain,

the eye’s search for the mind’s glinting level.
To say the light falls or is from
is misdirection:

it has no discernible mass,
belongs to no one.
I worry about you, said a friend

for whom my feelings
remained irrevocable. I had thought myself
...