It startles the heart the toll sunlight
Takes on man’s devisings,
Unchecked and unobserved,
One realizes that to be
Resigned, fully resigned
Takes more than patience,
But also exhaustion of the wellspring,
The self and further options.
Today it snowed for the first time.
The grasses in the fields are trodden down
By winter’s old miserly settling,
Creaky, indifferent-
The milkweed pods tattered, their downy comas drifting, wearying,
Waiting for sleep.
This seems to be the longest note I have written you,
Although barely a note.
My dreams are sluggish now, I inveigle them to return,
Call them back; they resist;
They will come only in times of distress, it seems.
I am not distressed now, merely ruminative–
Thinking of the time I first saw you,
Arising from the pasturages with a flower-basket on your arm.
The sun behind you mocks me now,
Moving mournfully along your flaring profile.
The soft breeze is a double insult,
Disturbing quietly the air around you
So that the world moves but you do not move.
You are a portrait or a statue, serene and warm,
Ineffable in your gaze.

Thinking of it now when all is dead
And the wind is no longer warm,
It is a mystery, all of it, although painfully simple–
Who was I then? Why has so much changed?
How can this memory exist, but the time,
Like all times,
Be so long gone.
Looking at this monument, the dusty road
Where you stood,
The sun enveloped in the creamy sky,
It seems the greatest misfortune is to be forgotten,
And folly, still, that those who are missed are thought to be preserved.
The French do not say it, I miss you.
You are missing from me, is how they put it.
All the blame is placed
On the one who is gone.
You never belonged here; new words won’t do.
Still, the bare memory of your feet
Treads on me, bears me down,
Is a weight on my heart, an avowal
With no reason, no purpose.
I can turn away from it, as I have from others–
Mulling upon myself, my Elizabethan curses,
Perhaps only I made it so.