Reckoning

You keep your failures close, intimate
as unwashed sheets—that colleague’s
novel left untouched in its box,
a dead friend’s corpus of poems
that will not see print,

an ex-husband who can’t
be shaken loose,
a lover who comes close
but not closer.

Here is your photo gallery:
mountain landscapes emptied of people,
still life of moss and rocks,
a crayfish surprised outside its burrow,
desperately waving its single claw.