I feel success in ways
she touches my back
with her fingers,

or in ways we can be alone,
in the scent of coffee
or bread, in icy air

that freezes my moustache.
I feel success in the morning,
between buildings, the slanted

voices between bodies, the cars
driving past cliffs of the lectures,
everything given another day,

ourselves given a further
chance to live on the earth.
How we keep coming back,

keep waking up, keep going
to sleep. How we lose things
and find new ways to cook

or sit. I am astonished
that life developed on such
a molten planet cooling off,

how the plants turn in a spiral
of the DNA we have making us
live and return to how we are

able to know, now with new
bodies, remembering how it felt
to be left alone as a child

two years old, in the summer,
on an afternoon, or the awe felt
as a four-year-old when first seeing

a row of huge poplars swaying
in a fast summer wind.
We go back to where we are

alive, in textures of plants,
in brightening shade and curves
of what another person says.