sliding closed on its own silent weight.

It was not so very different, really.

More as if the narrator had turned and departed,

abandoned the story,

and each tree, each stone, stood clear in its own full fate.

The dream, like the dog, went on, travelled elsewhere.

Passed by the moment when everything might have been changed.

Passed by the moment of knowing I wanted everything changed.

WHAT IS USUAL IS NOT WHAT IS ALWAYS

What is usual is not what is always.

As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.

Footsteps resume their clipped edges,

birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.

Where were they? By what route did they return?

A woman mute for years

forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

The bitter young man tires;

the aged one sitting now in his body is tender,

his face carries no regret for his choices.

What is usual is not what is always, the day says again.

It is all it can offer.

Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.

Only the reminder that there is exception.

THE MOUNTAIN

One moment, the mountain is clear

in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog.

I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again

from my reading and find in the window moonlight—

but when I do, the fog is still there,

and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray

while a single wild goose passed him, silently climbing.

TEARS: AN ASSAY

A great philosopher is born, walks his lifetime’s allotment of footsteps, and dies, but while he is living he has the demeanor and body and voice of a great clown. Each of his propositions is heard, but met with snorts, guffaws, and the wiping of tears of laughter from the eyes. Or perhaps it is the reverse: A great comic is born, walks the earth, and dies. But her demeanor and body and voice are such that people listen gravely, they nod in silence at her words, are moved to weeping by the feelings her thoughts cause to rise. The composition of tears of laughter and tears of grief is not, it seems, the same, though the tongue cannot tell this. Different still the tears of outrage, or the tears that come from a misplaced dust mote, errant eyelash, or flake of soot. Each brought to the earth a great if different pleasure. Each died unsatisfied and angry, though this too is not perceived. And where does the mistake lie, if a mistake is granted at all? In the person who refuses an inescapable fate, or in those who shed at his words their tears of subtly erroneous composition?

POE: AN ASSAY

In “The Gold-Bug,” the overt finding of the treasure

is tossed out mid-tale like a bone to a waiting dog.

His stories were not intended for the canine heart that howls inside us,

though he fed it the tidbits it needed to stay near.