Time to See
If you live through it long enough
maybe fifty years
and you drive on a narrow paved road you remember
from when it was a dirt rut between Gardner and Redwing
and you look back on your lovers
even the abuser
and if you can love who you have become
sagging knees, bunion, and all, you see
how they each tried for love in their own ways,
and you thank them in your breath
with your mouth’s tongue curled around dark coffee, generous
with bitter. This is peace. Like Siddhartha, your face
that you love as well as any face
just a lined old face,
gathered their sorrows and hope in feathered lines over your bones.
and your friends and sisters
even the ones you’ve quit sending cards too
unless you count tomorrow’s sympathy card
something about great trees falling and acorns,
those for whom the news clipping of a beloved painter’s elegy curls
to silence in a closed drawer of things meant to be shared,
each friend in her way smoothes your freckled hand,
cups your chin softly in her absent hand
as surely as your partner sits in the seat next to you.
If you live, say, past fifty,
though you could decide to see
this now or
this yesterday,
you look in the rearview mirror
of your dusty station wagon and you see
all the way back to peace, which is willows
bending along the roadside
red in winter, gold in spring, white
with catkins, green, then gold, then red again, and an irrigation ditch rushing full in the spring at their roots,
or to peace out the passenger window, which is surely
a foal teething on her first pale shoots of grass
and you look ahead to peace, which is an umbrella shaded picnic table
in a small yard where a father you’ve not met
back home alive from whatever war it was this time
rests and cradles his swaddled baby,
and to peace on the horizon where the moon and sun hang
together in one deep sky
and you see your life was always meant to drive this road.
(Pilgrimage and Pilgrimage Anthology, 2007)
