Mend

The autosarcophagous souls
Of forever hungry poets,
The freedom a crooked oak knows,

The fantasist’s forest shadows,
The shapes that lived only in coals,
The words that were lost in the snow,

Grass letting go of the loess,
The hermit’s cracked ceramic stove—
Inexact sameness, incomplete

Difference, no matter how closely
Confined inquiries we proposed,
Emended as soon as composed.