Permutations

Editor’s Note: This poem appeared in the Aug. 7 Book Review with a word erroneously added to the first line and missing the next-to-last stanza. Here is the poem in its entirety.

*

stone in water

growing

still

water in stone

still

growing

in the I whose eye

in the eye what sky

in the sky where’s I

ow-ow-ow-ow-howl

ow-ow-ow-ow-owl

ow-ow-ow-ow-wow

ow-ow-ow-ow-bow

the nothingness of all

the whole in the hole

how perfect a fit

From “Stone Bow Prayer”

(Copper Canyon Press:

130 pp., $14 )