Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

drifting ghostlike and invisible
on graveyard mound,
grazing the cheeks of grievers, pausing
upon the naked backs of lovers,
tracing the mysterious barricades between
the kingdoms of strays,
colliding with children in their chaotic play —
Hearing at night with brittle ears the plaintive sea,
the wearing away of shoreline,
the woeful throb of the requiem of whales,
the madrigal of feeding gulls, the thrust beat
of the albatross in its pinioned flight,
the hideous slurring of squids,
the inexorable gnashing of the machinery of sharks —
Mute, passive, dumb as a dead leaf
you shall hear them all —
You shall move among the avalanche of first snow,
amazed at the shattering of perfect ice,
its joyous crystalline tone as it falls,
the utterly new dimension of its remaining,
endlessly crushed and compacted and moved,
singed to a fog and sublimed away
as if it had never been, while you
still lay like an old coat in a hamper —
grayer, crisper, more decrepit than ever.
And you suspect your lingering immortality —
a leaf, a brittle parchment that no one can read,
a shard, a skeleton of cellulose,
a thread, a string, a lichen roost, a bird-nest lining,
a witness of ever-advancing decay and assimilation,
by becoming nothing, becoming everything.