A cloud. A lake. What do you want? A gazebo?
I won’t have it. The odor of new cut wood
mingles with rising steam from a silver tea-ball
I steep for my next-door neighbor who’s no good

at anything but literature, though he sits
and dawdles over a cup of herbal tea,
all decked out in his big-game hunter’s kit —
a blank-verse epic poem in camouflage motley —

and grumbles away about the Republican lock
on local politics, while an election unrolls
somewhere beyond our horizon, there where smoke
lifts the sky on its shoulders over the hill.

I’m restless. I’ve been tired of nodding my head
for twenty minutes now. Out on the water
there’s something doing something I don’t understand —
maybe a tumbling log, or maybe an otter.

So there you are, that’s what my life is like.
Take it or leave it. A cloud. A bore. A lake.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds (2010)
Accents Publishing

More from Metes and Bounds and J. Kates:

• “How Can There Be a War Going On”
• “The Dead”
• “Statement of a Refugee from Babel” from Bigger than They Appear
• Jim Kates’ “Most Important Thing”
• Metes and Bounds at the Accents Store

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).