ANCIENT OF DAYS

There is a kind of sunlight, in early autumn, at sundown,

That raises cloud reflections

Inches above the pond water,

                                 that sends us packing into the chill evening

To stand like Turner’s blobbed figurines

In a landscape we do not understand,

                                                                 whatever and everything

We know about it.

Unworldly and all ours,

                                          it glides like the nineteenth century

Over us, up the near hill

And into the glistening mittens of the same clouds

Now long gone from the world’s pond.

                                                                   So long.

This is an old man’s poetry,

                                         written by someone who’s spent his life

Looking for one truth.

Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.

Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives

Are part of it.

                         Unless the late-evening armada of clouds

Spanished along the horizon are part of it.

Unless the diminishing pinprick of light

                                                           stunned in the dark forest

Is part of it.

                    Unless, O my, whatever the eye makes out,

And sends, on its rough-road trace,

To the heart, is part of it,

                                then maybe that bright vanishing might be.