A Poet Reflects

I still struggle to understand.
         And oh the days and ways of woe since then,
this moon who won’t love us

as we need, only the unrequited touch,
         only the empty skin on skin of stolen hours
fractured out of time

and these sharp wings that beat
         through black, star-shredded space
vast as memory, but not everlasting.

—Bruce Weigl, closing unrhymed tercets to “My Early Training” from Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1999)