The Weight of the World

I look at a goat two hundred yards
deep in a field
wagging his head and the light
coming off him in flakes
of distance. He sees me
through his stopped day, and behind
the killing stillness of his beard
some weight of prophecy—it isn’t
just me anymore but an added look
that saw me, as if sky
examined sky, or grass grass. I think of this
all day and half the night
from a room where air breathed over and over
turns milky with sleep: what happens
through a single look carried
between the brass sun
and the glass stars.

Copyright © 2004 Frank Steele All rights reserved
from Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission