Concavities, Pock Marks, Depression

Depressions may relate to the weather.
Pock marks can be
the wear
made by war on a wall.

Sometimes despair
we describe as the suck of a hole.
These things we share,
when gathered together,
have depth.

New graves make clear
how lightly what we gather adheres
and how absurd
are the things we had hoped
might have happened.

As we grow old,
time leads us in different directions.
We give or hold,
remember
or ignore what we're told.

The holes that serve in the alley
are round and shallow,
in all ways spare.
These dust baths created by sparrows
cause me to smile,

as do the cones that ant lions hollow out
and the way dark soil
slides up and away from the share,
as if all toil
is relatively unimportant.

It's amazing how
little depends on our digging;
how our digging tends
toward whatever we thought not to know;

how raw truth bends
and twists in pursuit of its meaning;
how grid and trench
are meant to sift fact after screening;

how in the end,
very little that we know is put right,
but is like a song
the words of which are not found,
neither are forgotten.