As a scar commemorates what happened,
so is memory itself but a scar.  As in: Given
hunger, which is endless only until it isn’t, he
destroyed what he could.  And then? –

So the lover enters the beloved – enters,
and withdraws; so a yellow-crested
night-heron wades into view, then out:
useless?  It gets harder to say.  Like
signs of struggle in a field where nothing
stirs, the past can seem everywhere.  I think
to be useless doesn’t have to mean
not somehow mattering.  Years now, and

still I can’t stop collecting the strewn shells
of spent ammunition where I come across them;
carefully, I hold each up toward what’s left of the light.