1.
It was not the white fire across the pole
nor trumpets above the desert,
but a falling away—
the vast dissolution.
Like an ice flow, pieces broke off
and flowed away
and melted.
Everyone knew the reasons
and there were a thousand reasons
each one reasonable
until one day,
it was we who broke...
Let death come to me in mid-stride, while I am occupied with other matters.
Let my obituary be read and forgotten.
Let my children tell their children about the grandfather they barely knew, spinning tales that make me wise and mysterious.
Let my great-grandchildren at least hear my name.
Then...
She is deafened by the sound of her own opinions.
They echo and rattle between the walls.
She rings them like cathedral bells;
There she is in the back
red-faced as a sacristan
delirious among the bell ropes.
When I was twenty, ten years was half my whole life.
When I was forty, they were just another phase.
When I reached sixty, ten years drifted by like a sweet memory.
Now at eighty, I misplace whole decades at a time and
ten years pass
swift as a child's summer.
In the slow stride of galaxies is heard
the pulse of countless veins:
our enormous
our infintesimal
wound about the finger and beneath the foot,
you we ride and wear like diamonds
like the tiara of a distant queen.
All of evolution has led to this moment.
Our epicycle without end
is etched in...