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.” +