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.” +