Depression

Sometimes, like a snake, it will slither
in through my field of perception
while I’m listening to an old song
and coil its heavy body around my heart.

Other times, like a hook through a fish’s eye,
it will jerk me out of a peaceful moment
watching the wind in the sun-splashed grass,
and haul me on a line into a hopeless boat.

Of course there are days it doesn’t come,
days it remains forgotten, unopened,
like a dusty bottle of wine in the cellar.
But eventually it always returns: in a question

or in an inevitable answer, in the picture
of a lost lover or in the smell of honeysuckle,
in the eyes of an injured dog that appears
outside my door, the kind I have to learn to live with.