Today's poem is by Willie Lin

Teleology
       

I am finely attuned to failures.
I am an instrument of them. I accept my failings
vis-a-vis the design and accept confusion
as my occupation because I am a student, not a scholar.
This is the only world. And I am to it undifferentiated
as a lump of stone (for whom identity is not a riddle,
and I recognize the superiority of the stone in this aspect).
I am allotted an amount of daylight and that amount
shifts daily not according to my failures qua failure
but another logic. I am allotted darkness also, the effect
of which I can reproduce in part by shutting my eyes.

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Copyright © 2023 Willie Lin All rights reserved
from Conversation Among Stones
BOA Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission