Click here to listen to Nadia Herman Colburn read this poem. A lake flickers after snow,         and I enter the refraction,

like playing the piano—
         fingers moving under hand

the hour stretched with Chopin.
         In children, too, it's habitual:

a group mazes its way along the street
         like an amoeba under a microscope—

but once when the day still held us
         to itself, there was a sudden turning towards—

as when, in Wisconsin, from the back of the car,
         I first saw the man in the moon:

those craters, the eyes, the wide shadow at center
         the mouth. It was so obvious!

Now I'm always trying to forget
         so it can come again,

naturally, like the cat through the crack
         in the window over the garage,

or the fallen leaves