Just before the sun turns off comes that lunge
of light setting each window in the city on fire.
Behind that city, a field where the sun pauses
a moment to shut the small mouths of its molecules
placing a hot, gentle finger on their lips.

Then there--beyond the field--the herons swooping,
their white bodies netted in that final
flame, grieving through the grass,
backlit and as slender as forgetfulness,
this desire to believe what was lost
was not. The slender forgetfulness of continuing
the search. Dropping the fine thread of their beaks
against the new night sky.
How simple, still

like that singular memory I have retained
all these years of your skin
meeting the day's final stitch of light, which paused
a moment to bloom there. Who could blame it.
Your skin, in that moment, a darkness lit from behind,
like the sometimes darkness of yearning, like two
tiny, upset hands deciding to hinge together
the fix and the fissure.

That memory. I know.
Just a joint, a knuckle in the scheme of what was lost.
And the herons, after all, only a seam
left in the memory of the grass.

07/29/2005

Posted on 07/29/2005
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