The "That" That "That" May Be

Accommodating to a habitat is never
quite a case of sucking up
dismissively: “okay,
that’s that.”

The “that” that “that” may be
turns out to harbor in its
precincts bee hives
of complexity:

internecine and unconscious
dreamed activities which
work in tandem
to beleaguer,

tease, delight across a landscape
often most abundantly
experienced at night:
for instance, sturdy

though I feel when I drop off
to sleep at nearly nine,
I wake invariably
at three-thirty

to bestow upon my digs the startled
understanding that I’m
here and do not
quite yet grasp

the near and far and is-ness of
the place: as if to wake
up in this pre-dawn
space were to

begin to colonize the moon anew.
One never moves, one
must suppose, too
soon to learn

to see more richly where peculiarly
one chances in the throw
of existential dice
to grow instead

of atrophy. No generative choice,
perhaps, but to investigate
the “that” that “that”
may be.


.