I
    On ashes of old volcanoes
    I lie baking
    the deathward flesh in the sun.

    I can hear
    a door, far away,
    banging in the wind:

    Mole Street. Quai-aux-Fleurs. Françoise.
    Greta. “After Lunch” by Po Chu-I.
    “The Sunflower” by Blake.

2
    And yet I can rejoice
    that everything changes, that
    we go from life
    into life,

    and enter ourselves
    quaking
    like the tadpole, its time come, tumbling toward the slime.

From Collected Poems by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.