Oh for a life of sensations over thoughts!
-Keats

We passed into the shallows–
limbs slow wings–

the great world of days
something separable, irrelevant,

and minded only surface stars,
the dreaming elements.

So the stream held us: sensation fell
like water from our fingers,

shaped for an instant,
then returned–

and all we would attend to there
was summer sunlight, summer air.

Jody Bolz is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time (Gihon Books). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in such journals as The American Scholar, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares–and in many literary anthologies. She is an editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazine, founded in 1889.