Old Friends - Elizabeth Carothers Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Old Friends
 
 
Sometimes I see things at the edge of light --
small animals scurrying into shadow
from the corner of my eye, sometimes a man
shuffling off the road, disappearing
between the trees, lit by headlights, then gone.
And sometimes I hear things
outside the sandy blur of my tinnitus -- 
the yowl of the tom cat that’s been hanging around for months,
unseen birds, whose presence I scrawl on the white page,
what I think is a machine grinding in the distance, or voices,
the mind’s mutterings, over and over saying – what?
Sadness sadness sadness. There it is again,
grief, guilt, love. My old friends,
what can I do with your unsung laments,
your impossible losses?
Wind stirs the bamboo.
Brazen at last, without its close coat, the lily 
blooms bright orange. 
Something rustles in the woods and disappears 
in the dry leaves at the edges of my life, small
soft animals in the corner of my eye -- no, not ever really
gone. For all our lives are intertwined, our songs
caught in the golden throats of the lilies,
there at the rim of the moment, in the half-light, the half-dark 
of the world, where all suffering has its place
within the slightest breeze, the slow turn of petal in sunlight, each vein
distinct amid the gathering density of one life twisting
its strand with another in the great invisible braid
of the hidden river that moves through all of us,
here and after, ever after into mystery.
 
	- Elizabeth Carothers  Herron
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