Through the train window
Flashing eternity
Rolling, rolling, rolling
The hillsides by.
Later, I’ll say
I’ve been there,
Traveled through that place
Convinced and mystified.
Later still, I’ll return
And say
That’s not how it was
All skewed and modified
By isolation from memory
Disappointed
By lack of congruity
Deflated
By the irrefutable
Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?
Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?
Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.
An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,
Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.
A brace of haiku to weave into your dreams.
I.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
II.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
I dreamt Barriss Mills was Ogden Nash…
Oh, so round and hard to please
Rather like enormous peas
Big leathery living flaps
Curled about like sailors’ caps
Neither dry nor fully wet,
And green, so very green, and yet,
Despite the sheerness of their mass
Who knew inside was so much gas?
If you live long enough, you will see them die.
Longer still, and they fall like spring snow.
There are those who say grief is all second-hand,
That we grieve for ourselves alone
When those too like us prove mortal.
I suppose, for the first fierce blow,
That’s true: we stumble forward, gut-shot,
All death and bewilderment;
But after that? After the long parade begins in earnest?
True, a kind of acceptance sinks in,
A not-quite numbness, a sedation,
A shaking of the head, “Why,
Just yesterday…”
But there are ghosts.
They follow us everywhere,
And in some unguarded moment, a grief descends
Pure and sweet, almost holy,
And wholly devoid of self.
In these moments
We cradle our memories like children,
And all we long for
Is one more touch.
exiles child 