the party of the first part,
considering the merits of the cake,
adjudged the occasion worthy of the risk,
taking advantage of the outrageously low fares
available at all times to dreamers everywhere,
which was the icing of the thing, or perhaps
just the predictable result of a mind bent
on discovering how and why it is
that any cakes ever go
uneaten
I see but only barely,
I hear, but just in part,
I do not reach for you, because
We’re meant to be apart.
I think I know the future,
And it will get here, at last:
Let’s just hope, when it arrives
It’s not chained to
The past
I think of her that last, long winter:
How it was supposed to be —
Walking down that lonesome valley
Past the fence, and tree lines —
But you — you never knew her, did you?
Eyes that laughed at simple things,
The ludicrous, the painful (sometimes)
Even getting old —
How many roads within a lifetime:
Steps, missteps, and retraced steps —
The people we love best, but find
We barely knew at all
The sleep that comes the last, long winter,
Blankets clutched unsteadily,
Until the morning, down the road
Across the hill
An isolated family
Upon a distant hill,
The springtime of a reckoning,
Renewal of a will
Together in their loneliness,
Apart in their distress,
The sunlight finds them reaching out
And sharing
Blessedness
It’s just so hard to understand
When grass is tall and views are scarce:
The great unknown is so unplanned
And yet she has the same old cares —
Or forms of them, a little bit:
How far away the recent past
Seems now, when she might think of it,
But she has time to think
At last
Most of day, he sits in shadow,
Most of night, he dwells on dreams;
Maybe there’s a somewhere meadow,
But that’s not his life it seems
No new thing, this isolation:
He knows what to be, and do —
When you live upon the mountain,
Loneliness comes with
The view
Let the ones who know be known,
Let the news be close and thin —
Lonely flowers still must grow,
Sunlight still needs taking in —
She needs company at times,
Roots that stretch must drink in deep:
Lonely flowers still must grow
With such contact as
They keep
(between these two parentheses,
I close my eyes and hear the sound
of waves beneath a summer breeze,
and my friends laughing, townward bound,
but me — I stay to watch the night
reveal a thousand mysteries,
and hold what I love best most tight
between these two parentheses)
