the past is the intransigent shadow you stand upon -
the last ray of sun slanting in west of autumn,
west of each memory rewritten, condensed to a few lines on loss,
originating from a silence beyond where schoolchildren,
clamorous as a catastrophe of bells,
announce the unquestioning delight of themselves.

childhood is never about dreaming; dreaming is everything that follows,
how a body's soft delineations stroked by an ever-retreating source of light,
become slippery and smooth as colorless beads of water
skating the tightrope-taut nerve of your inwardly opening eye -
and how what follows conspires to fall away the moment the sky opens
the fist of its gaze and voices of children and rain, come to sing the silent
measure of your monotonous stride -
this frail music heard only in passing,
like the whispered phrases of someone not in love with you but
with their own beautiful, isolate pursuit.