ON BEING MUSED UPON

Reading his poems, you recognize yourself

in intermittent isolated images—your scent,

your nape, your hair, an arrangement of flowers

you once placed at the center of a long table.

It adds to evidence that you are being seen,

which is not the same as being watched,

a thing you wouldn’t want. Still, you wonder

whether the piecemeal you and she

resemble at all your version of who you are.

You may be seen but your nature is to be

disappearingly visible as vape smoke,

as the scentless rings your daughter perfects

as she begins to separate her identity from

you both, from how or how not she is seen.