There’s reveille
and there’s reverie
and there’s the all-too-wakeful revelation
that your dreaming heart
has been beaten in time
to the rhythm of a Keats sonnet
every year since you first read it,
sixteen and leftfisted
at a righthanded desk
in the center of a
—you only now realize—
ironically yellow-bricked classroom.
You’re older than he ever grew.
Trapped on a shore
of the biggest island
no one told you until recently
you could leave.
So you seek water.
And a horizon that blurs
when you look for too long.
Fishbowled lenses never broken
yet perpetually breaking the surface.