
Emerging from retirement
(for my good friend Robert)
At last I can go to work,
and make my own dawn,
cast off the grip, the drive, the contract of employment,
like hedgehog wake from hibernation,
like black grizzly bear resurrect from torpor,
no longer follow the politics of prose,
nor feign fellowship with routine strokes of stratagem and strategy,
awake with a hawk’s eye,
dive like thick-billed murre for cod and worms,
from the coast of a new land
from the marrow of bones too rested for their own good.