On Being Mused Upon
Reading his poems, you recognize yourself
in intermittent isolated images—your scent,
your nape, your hair, an arrangement of flowers
you once placed at the center of a long table.
It adds to evidence that you are being seen,
which is not the same as being watched,
a thing you wouldn’t want. Still, you start
to wonder whether the you and the she
resemble at all your version of who you are.
You are seen but your nature is to feel
disappearingly visible as vape smoke,
as the scentless rings your daughter perfects
as she begins to separate her identity from
you both, from how or how not she is seen.
