An Elegist
You said the arc of things was always
towards their ends; all bows bend
towards goodbye. Light the violet
clung to vanished come December,
ships dissolved in their harbor’s pulse.
I had a patience no one would believe,
an aptitude for silence as the heart-
ambulance idled. I was a lighthouse
on a coastal skein. How could I deny you
what you’d hoped to suffer, seeing
what it was your hand had done, letting
go with one, holding on with the other.
Things
Things assume a sort of peace
if you accept life’s limitations.
That’s more or less the lesson
the beloved taught me
believing in collusions
of inanimate objects,
the knife twice broken
in his hand. Still, I miss him
knowing them, the things
I know, a poem by Housman
for this time of year
when the sun won’t gamble
past the horizon. And how,
May afternoons, he stroked
my palm and spoke of days
like this one, not this one.
Image © Ashok Boghani
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