I could have guessed,
and haven’t guessed wrong yet,
that out in West
the sun would set.
Stupid as that may seem
to some of you,
the ones who’d dream
it wasn’t true
are few.
But even for all the certainty
that guess would seem
to have for me
I must confess —
it’s still just a guess.
Hills and towers
wander through smoke — dreams
half there, half ashes.
The street this morning glows, cool gray and wet.
Wispy blobs of winter fog roll in
like cotton balls that fell from a cabinet.
The windows drip with drops of paraffin;
steel poles run with streaks of iodine,
blotching the flaking eggshell outer skin
of paint where a crack grows, a russett vine.
I stare through the thick mist that obscures Marin’s
blue hills and the still green strait
where, on floors of needles and dripping ivy,
ravens under the white sheet imitate
a beeping monitor. Where is this? I see
a street and a sterile room. Each image lies
beneath the sheet of fog before my eyes.
You — you in the coat of gray,
the dappled gray, the threaded gray,
whose figure stops, who stops to sway
in the lavender haze of a winter day;
you — you in that threaded coat,
the coat now dappled a lavender-gray,
your head arched back to look and see
the branches of a spreading tree;
the crooked branches of a tree,
a spreading tree, the silhouette branches
crazed across a field of gray on a winter day,
across the clouds, the clouds a cool white-silver gray —
the silhouette branches, swaying in strokes of deep warm gray —
the strings of the tree and the clouds and the evening
pull at your head to dance and sway
with the breeze that dances dappled branches
in a round, hypnotic way —
and you, and I, and the winter sky
dance in a trance-like reverie,
as who are you and who am I
and where is the end of the winter sky
all blend with the gray and the gray in the gray,
in a deepening field of gray.
I find that, in a famous phrase,
a corollary’s also true:
don’t bother others in the ways
you wouldn’t have them bother you.