Waiting for Tom, the boy who can fix my computer if anybody can,

I observe how the minutes, emptied of content,

ooze past like transparent microörganisms

in magnification’s slow motion. I have the time

at last to consider my life, this its stubby stale end—

whither, and wherefore, and who says?

But I fail to. I look out the window again.

A wisp from the woods announces that my neighbor is burning brush.

Wind tugs the rising plume this way and that,

a signifier that doesn’t know its mind.

My desktop is cluttered, but what

can be discarded utterly with certainty

of its not coming back to haunt us from the kingdom of the lost?

My wife no longer acts like a mistress,

but surely I am too frail to seek a mistress;

passé the pink salmon’s slick effortful flipping

up the icy, carbonated cataracts.

Is there anything to write about but human sadness?

Even if there were, I couldn’t write it today.

My neighbor’s smoke has stopped rising; his fire, too, is down.