—after Wallace Stevens
  
 I placed a tattered sonnet in a Mason jar
 on a low hill in Tennessee, adrift and lost,
 and waited for rains to wash my frail poem far
 eastward, tumbling to brook, to stream, river-tossed
  
 past roots and slim hulls to wave swells of the sea.
 By current shape and wind-shift my errant words
 made shore-fall, breaking on Spanish rocks, setting free
 my scrawl to flutter among seagulls and shore birds
  
 who threw them into the crackling eye of our sun.
 Sliding through the edge of an unknown Milky Way,
 my particled sonnet slipped slyly into one
 black hole or another to worm its stellar way
  
 to this orbit, reincarnated mystically,
 my lines, rhymes restored to a jar in Tennessee.