last night, talking about the bicycle thief

last night, talking about the bicycle thief

with leah, about realist cinema

and the question of whether or not a thing

can have transcendent meaning

if its creator did not intend it to

and now, tonight, studying raymond carver’s eyes

in the large black and white photo of his face

on the back of all of us, the definitive collection of his poems,

realizing I can see something, there, in them,

the reflection of what he was seeing,

the person taking his picture

and, beyond him or her, a thin straight line

vertically bisecting the rectangle of the reflection,

which could be a window pane, and, beyond that,

a cut off triangular shape that could be a tree,

an evergreen

or maybe not, maybe the reflection is of something else,

but, whatever it is, there is something there,

a truth more piercing than any of his poems