“In the directions you've given, what is a pond”
In the directions what's a pond, what a small body of water,
what happens when the paved road you're told to follow is under repair
and the sign is handscrawled and small where you were to go left.
The dead speak in pictures, some 19 th century figure keeps saying,
and there she is posing for a photograph and completely lost
but for her high-laced boot struck out of the doorway as a lure.
The problem, he notes, is a bewildering excess of trails:
Turn left across the brook and then up to the third marker
below the gate and actually located in a near-by turn-off.
By day they seemed quite ordinary pebbles surrounding the pond
where the island floats and illegibility is up for grabs.
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