"There Is No Science of the Soul"

How much life can anyone get
Away with, wonders Mark at night.
He's recently started thinking
Of himself in the third person

Again, everything else feeling
Too raw, too intimate, the language
Refusing to allow distance
Constructed without a pronoun.

Not that anyone would accuse
Him of intimacy. Arrogance,
Maybe. Pretension, certainly.
How much can one get away with?

He parks his car by the roadside
In view of the stratigraphy
That passes for the skin of life
Peeling away from the present,

Hinting at buried origins.
That life should be buried at all
Bemuses him. Why not a life
That went without killing itself

With the effort to keep going
At the expense of life itself?

Virga trails a man-o'-war scrim,

Crossing the rocks, leaving no mark.