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
that collect each night by the door.