it ought to have altered my existence. I observed him bent above his composition, hours
consumed informing minuscule granules
of tinted sand of his convoluted plans on the soil, sketching cobalt flowers,
scarlet flowers, a single colossal blossom obscuring the dried, packed earth.
It was so lovely,

I would have given everything to be able to roll it up in its entirety
and take it back home with me, but the storm stole it minutes after
it was finished, spreading fantastic ribbons of contrasting dye
against one another until there was nothing left but flawed, vaguely
grayer smudges striping the blond sameness of the barren sand. the tiny man

rose to his feet, beamed at me as though he had intended on the storm,
and walked slowly away. it should have changed my life. I should have
taken it away with me his lack of creative arrogance, his readiness to just
let his day evaporate in the quest for a small moment of exquisite beauty,
and just the beauty of that one small moment.

I was wholly determined to go home and expunge the whole
of what I had ever composed that day, that week, that whole
crazy year of my life, overflowing as I was
with the little man’s palpable happiness at the creation of something
so temporary. I figured that taking joy in just the act of writing

should be adequate for me, too. I sat in my tent for hours, gazing at page
after page of hurriedly-scribbled poems, annotations,
fictions, tomes almost started and some almost finished
and couldn’t do it. I failed. I wanted to. I would like to be released
of this baggage of miscellaneous papers,

to set fire to all my petty dreams, disperse the pieces of me that are frozen
in those notes
but I haven’t the power to set them all free.

Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press). Her paypal is lalena@bitstream.net.

Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. An author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review, and Sybil, among other publications.