Inside "Sunday Morning"

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
                                                   ~Wallace Stevens


I sit in this poem in my peignoir—perhaps it is a mist
of green under which I've smuggled in the lambs
or maybe it is a hard red stitched in invisible words.

In this poem I can stay and no one pulls me from
coffee and oranges or questions. I watch boys pile
stone fruit on platters, over-occupied by metaphysical

matters, forgetting siren songs on rocky shores.
I can't be moved from clouds in an inhuman birth
finding their likeness to things lost. Life-sized

puppets—fishermen and witches—wave arms to the birds,
parade along the ocean's edge. I watch and set my alarm
for nightmare minutiae, the mooreeffoc of Dickens

where momentary doors are real and windows
are but mirrors with forged reflections back to ocean
agates and false smells through keyholes.

The most frantic fear of all is the most precise panic—
when you look babies into another's pupils, you find
you aren't there or anywhere, but here all at once.