Lupine, Clear Place

desire prize ambition lakeside
lupine,
clear place—
——
For a minute prizes didn’t matter because the black and white
spider sat in the daisy.

Two ducks along the shore that the ice storm had ravaged,
so that there were more blue lupine than before—

And in fact everything was more vivid because it had once
suffered defeat: the rocks were blooming,
there were less places to sit—

For a long time the prize was a clear place to sit, inside of all
that was resurging—

So that winning equaled the dust-blue tails of lupine?

When you had been thinking it was more like the man
kayaking out there,
against the triangular wakes of the speedboats—

For a minute the prize was forgetting about it. For a minute
the lake’s silver page—

field that was mirroring creation—

that there was a clear place to sit,
inside of all that wanting—