Morning Poem of Sincerity, With Two Lines by a Four-Year-Old

In the thin stand, mist and thought

though my thought jars little but my eyes,

jumping through them over the lichen—sometimes within itself, sometimes sidewise after two squirrels—

each start starts more branches than a tree has,

for my heart is like a teapot

whose mist neither settles nor rises among the leaves—

content sky, content to thicken

until heaven—

“Morning Poem of Sincerity, With Two Lines by a Four-Year-Old” originally appeared in What Remains, a chapbook published by the Poetry Society of America (2005).