— Gregory Orr, from “When I first saw …” in The Caged Owl: New & Selected (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

“When I first saw her
she was so beautiful
I wanted to be a mirror
and hold all of her.
My eyes couldn’t do that,
much as I tried
to calm them, saying:
‘Drink deep of her face.’ If I had become a lake …
A mirror is all surface
but a lake has depths.
I would have drawn her in,
[…]
alive inside me.”