With Issa

      by Nelson Ball

Little
bits

of
desperate

cloud
the air.

I
can’t

catch
much

of
anything.

I’ll
go

&
sit

with
Issa

by
the Tamagawa.


From With Issa: Poems 1964–1971, Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1991, page 120. This poem was first published in The Poetry Sheet #3, 1973. In the With Issa book, Ball also writes, in “A Way of Seeing Things,” page 35, that “a way of seeing things, / the objects of every- / day concern: detach from use, / what it / is, not what / for.”        +