The Endless

I saw a yellow butterfly
flying
in my opinion
the wrong way, flying across
the sound
to Connecticut

I saw a cormorant
oily-looking
flying
close to the sea’s surface
precisely
as I floated on it on

my back in
the attitude of the crucifixion
minerals in my body
in
conversation with
the minerals of the sea

about the sun
how can I possibly
add
to what’s already been said
so well
by the ancients

and said with
an austerity I’ll never
know
it is an honor to take
a backseat to the ancients
who knew how

I was a fat white fish
dissolving
under the sold-out stadium sun
like a god
but like a god
I could live through anything.

I refuse to do annotations on this poem. It's too soon. Let me procrastinate till the due date for the Mentor Poet Project. In any case, here's a picture of Timothy Donnelly: 

This man and his beard exude so much swag; I'm truly jealous. While this reasoning may seem a bit superficial, albeit it is, the reason that I picked him was just because he caught my attention while scrolling through Poets.org. After some research though, he truly does seem like an interesting poet. His education in literature is almost unrivaled; a BA from John Hopkins and an MFA from Columbia. Donnelly's work has been widely praised. Jorie Graham has remarked that his poetry is "musically brilliant and articulate," and Richard Howard found Donnelly's first collection, "as vigorous, as fresh, and as authoritative" as the work of John Ashbery. To be mentioned in the same sentence to the legendary John Ashbery is an accomplishment in & of itself.

Beyond that he is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including those from The Paris Review, Columbia University, and the New York State Writers Institute. Donnelly is the current poetry editor at the Boston Review. He is also a professor in the Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

This poem is interesting because he wrote the first three stanzas to it in his head while he was Long Island Sound. He had intended for the poem to take an eco-theological direction and address human greed and destruction, but it's clear that didn't end up becoming the true meaning behind this poem: rather he let the poem itself take its own direction and carve its own path.