Alone are those who mourn
for the long, retreating sigh of the wind,
for the last warm light before descending,
for the skeleton boat where the lake
once lived, for the sparrow who falls
and is not noticed.

Alone are those who edge
across the dark ice of pain,
arms outstretched,
keeping their balance,
moving forward.

Alone are those who mourn
the loss of those received
with outstretched arms
and suffering.

We see what we want to see:
so I was told by an authority
on the subject. I almost
believed him.

I have a need to read everything:
the scrolling credits at the end
of the movie; calorie counts
on the milk container; that objects
in mirror are closer than they appear.

Does the eye parse the sentences
of light that speak to us?
Do we choose their wavelengths
for our own reasons?

What will I miss if I’m seeing
what I know so well, looking
always in the same direction? I don’t
know what I’m missing. I don’t know,
I don’t know.

Point me in any direction
and I will find the face in the crowd,
the one seen before the light changes,
the one I will never know.

My friend, at sixty-two,
lost her father,
which is what we say
when someone
we love has died.
“I am alone now,” she said.
“I am an orphan.”
In her garden, the daffodils
burst from the soil early
this year, their shoots
green and firm. On her knees,
she clears last year’s leaves away,
her breath a wisp of light.

Deep in the field that summer day,
we found the salt lick cast away,
it seemed to us — we didn’t know
what use it had — a block of rock,
raspberry red in clovered grass,
beneath the oaks.

Then, seeing neither cows nor men,
we rolled it down the blazing green
above the cliffs that ranged along
the western edge of world and time,
above the waves, into the sun,
late in the day in ‘68.

I did regret that minor theft,
and wondered what the seals made
of such a thing upon their beach.
How long, I thought, before the tide
reached out and welcomed salt to salt?
But looking back, I must confess,
to just a touch of boyish pride.

It's the breakfast buffet at 7:45,
with scrambled eggs in watery pans,
toast curling by the instant coffee,
home fries tossed in sodden heaps.

The couple at the window table are not
speaking. Her gaze is fastened on
the parking lot: his eyes are with the waitress.
"American Pie" sings goodbye from somewhere.

When he was fourteen, she was twelve;
they spent the summer running in and out
of each other's yards. They climbed up to
his treehouse, sticky palms from oozing sap,

thunder rolling down like boulders, his father
yelling from the porch to get their asses
back inside before the lightning fried 'em alive.
She kissed him on the cheek and ran for home.

He squinted through the rain
at her flashing legs and knew
he'd always follow. He would trace
her face's shape down to her smile.

He'd been sparing with his words;
he'd pared it down to simple touch.
But forty years along the kids are gone,
the business sold,

and he knows what she will say
and she's heard everything he knows,
and there isn't any cause
to look for wonder any more.

I am a connoisseur of words,
selecting this one over that,
preferring, usually, the ones aged
in constant use over this year's crop.

I show my age and era: bad meant bad
when I was young and good was opposite
of bad. I still am up for something my
younger friends are down with.

But like them, I do not care if
I end a sentence with with. Although
I draw the line at doubling up a word
for emphasis emphasis.

In contrast to some teenaged girls,
my claims upon a personal god
are kept within my silent prayers —
not chattered up in shopping malls.

I do enjoy a Latinate embellishment at times,
luxuriate in polysyllabic morphings now and then.
But sturdy Anglo-Saxon words will do just fine
for everything but obscurantist bureaucratese.

Words are given that we might create,
and having created we can say
that we have lived, and having lived
return in gratitude the life we have received
when it is done.

In the old stories the knight waits for the lady,
who may know of his waiting or not.
This waiting is a hunger. It is not necessary
that the lady know. But it could help.

We wait between one note and the next,
a heartbeat or two. The shape of loneliness
fills any space.

You can wait for the world to change,
but I don't think it will. Those tracks
were laid long ago. Large souls arrive
among us; we linger in their shadows.

Here is a waiting of leaning forward,
another of turning back, wistfully. Practice
a waiting that moves toward your hunger.

In the Psalms it says, "Wait for the Lord."
With the Lord, a thousand years are as a day.
It takes courage to wait for the Lord.
That is in the old stories too.

These latter days bring me full around
the turn to time. The beating heart of it.
The steady drip of it from the eaves
before the light rises through the trees.
The rings of it in the tree
snapped like a twig.
The whirling storm of it.
Time in my hands, a gift.
The spending of it.
Time ahead:
no promises.

I saw myself today from a distance.
A boy I could have been, might have been,
jumping the fence so lovingly built
for my protection.

To ascend the primal mountain,
day extends its glistening hand
from the creation of the world.
My missteps are mine to learn from.

I wonder now if they are ours to share
as we step into those polished grooves,
as we wear the world upon our backs
like an old and rumpled flannel shirt,

thin at the elbows, rolled-up sleeves,
the faint scent of all Eve's children
still an evening's warmth within it. 

In the order of things we line up
alphabetically; we read from left to right.
Power's talons grip from top to bottom,
greater over lesser, from richer
to poorer. But then, we can delight in how
a tree lives all the way down to its roots,
how water seeks the lowest point.

Up from the bottom,
counting the layers of sediment,
Paleolithic to now,
the first responders up the stairs
in a building dying from the
top down, shedding light and
lives, profit and loss statements
floating like feathers. Photos of wives,
brother, children, freed to wing
across the city, caught up to drift,
light upon light, ashes to dust,
scudding street-wise, lastly
swept up against the bus stop.

And then there is time, measured out
in spoonfuls — the stray loose minutes
before the alarm, the tension now and yet again
vibrating like the filament in a light:
grief before joy, pain before release, apocalypse
now, revelation then. And death, always death.
But then, life.