What I Am Not Paid to Do

What I am not paid to do
could be gathered
to a gold point
near snack shacks
on the Plymouth seashore

headstones
thin as slate
deep as hope

blind as bones

these rings of sunshine
I have dreamt
and grasped falling backward
and lost,

spiraled to
the future
of men
I've never known
or bested



I wonder
what kind of spark
my soul

might give
against
the steel of
held-out miles

A good question,

this is

in weeds

no fatherhood left
to give

no daughters, sons —

a deserved curse —

deserving
I have given
the limping veins of my own wrists
grasping after couplings
in the

North

the North.

What I am not paid to do
plunges
in the slipstream and

grows a soul and

retrieves
rings of sunshine
from that

which was