One Dark Ruin Hurled

When poets aren’t composing
For lovers, wished-for lovers,
Or friends they won’t see again,

When they aren’t remembering
Childhood mistakes or abuse,
Or the cruel things said to them,

When they aren’t taking notice
Of the landscape around them,
Its creatures or its seasons,

They tend to swivel the lens
Toward more general things,
Surveying whole histories,

The past as single pattern
Repeated to abstraction.