Old Friends - Elizabeth Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Old Friends


*. . . ‘the edges’ have a curious parallel in visual physiology.*

*Margins make sight possible. . .* *.*

Paul Shepard


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 hanging around for months,

unseen birds, whose presence I scrawl on the white page,

a machine grinding in the distance, or voices,

the mind’s mutterings, over and over saying – what?

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 -- 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

of the world, where suffering swings

in 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 us.

	- Elizabeth Herron
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