draft, 12/31/22

We’re made of light, you and I
every cell of our bodies
built by its transmutation
into the soft, the corporeal,
into cornflowers blowing in a meadow
a deer or a child
running through that meadow, or diving
into a dark, cool pond.

You lay on the beach in the morning
you were probably fourteen
you’d let me come with you just that once
and I listened to the brush of the waves on the
shore and thought yes, this is the way to
capture the beach — early in the morning, not
talking, listening to the waves. I felt let into your secret
I felt very grown up
sanguine and yet uneasy, like a cat,
to be with you.

We understand but one tiny slant shard
of this wild universe
where death and life and time bear little
resemblance to what we know of them —
and still you are gone, rent
from us, and we are diminished.

Loss is the gift
I heard in a dream. I am still
trying to understand. I hold it in my heart
and it feels obscurely true — and then
comes the outrage: like hell it is.
I am not resigned to this — someday it may
settle like a stone in deep water
but for now it is still falling, and heavy
on the river of my days.
It falls over and over.

I suppose without an end
we would lose everything.
Only an empty riverbed is unchanging.

We’re made of light, you and I — light
made corporeal
to play, to embrace, to eat, to argue.

I will greet you in the glint of the snow.
I will walk with your absence in the dark wood.
I will carry your gentleness inside me.

Light yearns for what we have and it
comes here, to this ephemeral place
to live as flesh, glorious, and to die.