A Wall-like Understanding

For Jane

There’s no scaling it. No walking around.

No windows for glancing or doors

for passing through. It rises up 

and hides everything when I read 

your poem with the bird, or when I turn 

the lined paper over, study its blank

inverse. Reason ends there. One thinks,

it being a wall, another ground must wait

beyond the wall, but if such is the case

that ground is not for standing. More likely,

I believe, the wall is endlessly deep

like the distance crossed to get there. Another name 

might be “floor-like understanding.”

I saw the wall this morning, my mother

was adjusting the pillows on her bed, 

her body bent over and turned away, I learned

I could one day forget her quiet face,

how she looks in her blue robe, adding milk 

to coffee. Or as in Charlie’s allegory

of the sand pit digger, the fact of digging sand

each day being “what he does.” What he must have felt

in the moments before sleep or at dawn 

taking the shovel again in his hands 

and beginning to work.