It seems like you could, but

you can’t go back and pull

the roots and runners and replant.

It’s all too deep for that.

You’ve overprized intention,

have mistaken any bent you’re given

for control. You thought you chose

the bean and chose the soil.

You even thought you abandoned

one or two gardens. But those things

keep growing where we put them—

if we put them at all.

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.

Even the one vine that tendrils out alone

in time turns on its own impulse,

twisting back down its upward course

a strong and then a stronger rope,

the greenest saddest strongest

kind of hope.

And the ocean smells like lilacs in late August-how is that.

The light there muted (silver) as remembered light.

Do you have any children?

No, lucky for them.

Bad things happen when you get hands, dolphin.

Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing?

There is no down or up in space or in the womb.

If they’d stabbed me to death on the day I was born, it would have been an act of mercy.

Like the light the last room, the windowless room at the end, must look out on. Gold-tinged, blue

vapor trail breaking up now like the white line you see, after driving all day, when your eyes close;

vapor trail breaking up now between huge clouds resembling a kind of Mount Rushmore of your parents’ faces.

And these untraveled windy back roads here–cotton

leaves blowing past me, in the long blue

horizontal light–

if I am on an island, how is it they go on forever.

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught

glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have

I described it, I can’t, somehow, I never will.

How is it that I didn’t spend my whole life being happy, loving other human beings’ faces.

And wave after wave, the ocean smells like lilacs in late August.