Give praise

There’s a peculiar geometry to where
my days take me; in circles
inscribed in squares, where
I’ll greet the same faces, faces
oval and round, and then some
with more angular features.
Sometimes
they’ll scatter along stray lines,
and sometimes
they’ll challenge me
to remember where
I met them.
Sometimes they don’t, change
or challenge me,
because sometimes
they can’t move
and there is no face to remember.
I met an elm of silver.
It was robed in the indigo
night. Robbed of a limb, I made it
a face there,
with a ring for its smile
and a knot for its eye,
but I couldn’t move it.
I couldn’t turn it,
not its not-eye,
or its not-mouth
up to the marshmallow
light, no matter how hard
I tried. Yet,
the light still fell there,
and it made the elm’s not-mouth
sing, “Give praise,
dear boy, not for what you’ve made,
but for the light
and what it makes,
when it falls
in the fullness of our circles.”