•

Out of the window of the Committee
on Preschool Special Education,
a triangular intersection
of traffic at the uptown crossing.
The parents, here without their children,
to petition on their behalf, are lonely
only in this passageway, the unaccompanied
shelter of the twelfth floor where they are signed in
by a kindly woman to spend some hours
waiting for a supervisor always
late with the correspondent gates of paperwork
but who has primary authority to accede
or deny in many languages, for
there is no loneliness in the company
of children. With an air of apology,
the young woman calls out Miss, Sir,
not knowing the names, and they try to catch
in her glance to whom she wishes to speak,
but the optic axes of her eyes
coincide divergently, catching
two families simultaneously, every face
responds with apology to the summons,
the clerk’s oblique eyes calling each of them,
none of them, all of them, generally beheld.

•

She is dying, said the nurse. It was a Tuesday
in the new century. But not then—
she found strength again, her sturdy legs
kept their footing in the beige laced shoes.
A greenwood of beeches outside her window.
A Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
A Saturday. A Sunday.

•

How strange—but then ‘strange should be dried out
for a millennium,’ Ricks says. Journey,
too. Poor old words. Even so, how out
of the way—? to be the subject.
To whom would it be otherwise?
Who becomes familiar with mortal
illness for very long. I was a stranger, &c.
Not everyone appreciates it, no
one finds being the third person
becoming, it’s never accurate,
and then one is headed for the past tense.
Futurity that was once a lark, a gamble,
a chance messenger, traffic and trade, under sail.
The boy touches your arm in his sleep
for ballast. It’s warm in the hold. Between
ship and sky, the bounds of sight
alone, sphere so bounded.

•

1955

Alone in the mountains one day
she felt, she heard, a half step behind her,
someone, who, the multitude, a sole
companion? Joining her at the left turn
of the road, and she did not break
her stride, her grandson from years hence,
or was it her dead brother from years past,
from childhood, from infancy,
keeping her company for now.

•

At a distance, a small wood islanded
in the meadows. Paths innumerable
through beech and growth, ferns and decay,
shifting light raising the dry scent of
summer sun from the ground.

The quarter hour abided, it had no
cessation while I stood there astride
the bicycle—what is not bounded
by the limits of perception but looks on,
a door unlatched, ajar—restless
irregular light and shadow, awakened,
having arrived at a turn—

then pushing off. At play with instability,
worthy of mastery, tires going at speed
along the packed sand of a road that ran
from field to field without discernible end
in all of Europe.

•

The child moved through the hour
from fridge to table to fridge again
with sure command, small strength and purpose,
all his might against the magnetic
door gasket. Consented to being dressed,
consented to the descent of stairs,
step over step, to meet the bus,
moving torso, hips, this way and that
in an early dance to the tune
of protest, clutching a black train as he boarded
and the driver swung the doors shut
and I waved at the children pressing their faces
to the windows as it drove towards the river.
May they all be covered by feathers.

This is drawn from “All Souls.”