Into This Absence

        A line, a white line, a long white line,

         A wall, a barrier, toward which we drove.

                                                        —T.S. Eliot

What is available to us?
Simple routines: fault and moments.

Between building and building, dark fogs
drizzle. The world is enormous. Unfathomable salt.

A slug on the path posits its feelers to figure which way

to turn. Some slow work to go forward.

Agnes Martin teetered and retreated.

I’m tracking down less.

The line laying right there.

Again and again. And below it.
After talking death with a friend all morning, what I need

is this truth
that runs through the hiatus, the measured task

the mind makes to move off either side.