A Poem Looks Back on the Page

Are you the sort to glance or gaze?
Does a rich, real world fall your way,

Or are you prone to think you once
Had what you saw, saw what you wished,

And now pine for what’s not in view?
It seems best to be the first one,

But who could trust one with such ease,
At one with a world as it seems?

The sort who glance do seem just fine,
But more in the sense what they see

They see to be theirs—or should be,
Or will be, or could be, if they

Were to want it, rich world, as is.
To gaze—from a street, from a house,

From a hedge, from a stretch of ditch
Past a wall, past a barbed-wire coil—

To long like that is what it’s like
To live. We’d gaze. We long to live.