Round

Perhaps you covet something of its emptiness, its uselessness in matters of  yearning or feeling another’s yearn, that it can’t know a damn thing, yet damns everything it touches: the water it gathers along its passage, the air it pushes through, swallow-like. It is no bird, though you envy the song you hear only after it’s gone, even if  it sings through paper, a goat, the neck of a man wearing a scarf that tufts just as the rest of   him flies out of his shoes and collapses in dirt. Or, how it is like the dirt receiving him, the privilege of not knowing if   he was kind or unkind, as you chamber another, waiting for someone to come for his shoes.