Reflection

Reflection

I thought I understood necessity

but now I wonder what has brought me here

reading Kunitz in the park

and the bug that pads across the page. 

And this bug, I want to know the thing that drives it,

across the long expanses of the page

while people stump the poems of their lives
waiting for the lines to tell the way.

For what could it know when, arriving at the strophe
"It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn"

it pauses for a moment,
and twitches its antennae, once,
then strikes out across the "deeper dark"
and then so surely off the page?

Alone again, I wonder what is in that bug
that might also be in me,
as I chance across the long expanse
of grass, pausing at the far edge of the park.