Getting Ready to Move On
The last flowers blaze their dry color
like Easter baskets left outside all year into the first freeze of autumn,
their reds and oranges flaming from dry frost-bit stalks.
This is the last day after sixteen years we will tend them.
In the spring rains, a new enormous house of fieldstone
will fill this garden with its family of four and three car garage.
This is the garden that glowed the golden color of my wife’s hair,
gone cold now with memory and the need to be elsewhere.
We will not be here,
having followed the leaves in their last ecstasy,
The empty rooms of our children will have been torn down:
our children will be lying with their own in other beds.
They will come and go with the turning of books in far away towns
I think, if we are lucky, the photographs from inside our house
will be carried on a coyote’s wail into the night of western mountains.
There will be parties by candlelight on desert slopes with desert friends.
There will be winter streams that lay a black ice over these years
so that we can skate over them dancing above our aging friends.
If we are lucky, there will be no pain in letting go.
--Jared Smith, from Lake Michigan And Other Poems, 2005
