Somewhere night is falling
Somewhere a man stands outside a church
too bitter to enter, yet bound by doubt to that place
Somewhere a woman fills a glass with clear water
and flowers drink their last moments
in the last light of the fields
Somewhere a child stands next to a wall in the desert
Somewhere there is a house with a portrait of Beethoven
and a child who wonders if it is a picture of her grandfather
Somewhere there is a boy learning to wait
Somewhere, for the sake of his children, a man
writes what he has seen
Somewhere, for the sake of his children, a man
will not write what he has seen
Somewhere there is a son with the memory of a father’s
touch on his back, giving him courage
Somewhere a mother gives courage to thousands of
mourners at her son’s funeral
Somewhere a man measures the dimensions of the prison
precisely
Somewhere a woman plants a garden in front of the prison
Somewhere thousands stand where once
the square was empty
Somewhere a cave is lit by a torch
Somewhere there is man who walks beside us, without a
hat, in the rain
Somewhere a man reads a letter and folds it carefully
into his heart
Somewhere a man weeps for what he has found
Somewhere between Paris and London, a man peels an
orange on the train
Somewhere a man waits in a train station with the taste of
coffee on his palate
Somewhere a man waits in a city for a woman who
waits for him
Somewhere a man holds out his hand before we know
we need it
Somewhere there is a room lit only by a painting
as night falls
Somewhere there is a man who is not afraid to live in a
woman’s hope
Somewhere there is a man who has not forgotten anything
and has written it down
Somewhere there is someone so close to you, there are no
details
Somewhere a woman’s gift has not been deepened but
corrupted by loss
Somewhere there is a man who has given away everything
and stands in the rain, grateful
Somewhere the dead are leaving a sign
Somewhere there is a man who meets his late mother
in Lisbon
Somewhere a man makes soup for the village
Somewhere a man tells a woman she is not
as alone as she thinks and she understands
she is precisely as alone
Somewhere a man remembers a blue shirt left behind
forty years before
Somewhere a man inscribes the back of a photograph
and dates it twenty years before either of them
were born
Somewhere there is a painter carrying a spare egg
Somewhere there is a man driving away from
the marketplace with cages of unsold chicks
in the back seat of his Peugeot
Somewhere a woman stops for petrol, thousands of white
origami birds pressed against the car windows
Somewhere on the shoulder of the highway, not long
before he dies, a man opens the hatch of his truck and
shows a woman his paintings, all imaginings of her body,
how her skin feels against his mind
Somewhere a woman wakes in the night and knows
no one will ever write a poem for her
Somewhere a man answers courage with courage
Somewhere a man fights for nothing
Somewhere a man digs his own grave in the forest and waits
Somewhere a man builds the room where his child
will be conceived
Somewhere a man and a woman leave a note in the rafters
Somewhere a man and a woman leave the threat
outside the door in order to defeat it
Somewhere a man wonders how many thousands of years
men have lain with a woman
just this way
Somewhere a woman slips off her scarf without untying
the knot at her nape
Somewhere a man writes of that scarf
and the fist of the knot against his back
Somewhere a man is repairing the night, one word at a time
Somewhere a man sends a message “spoken
before hands ever wrote”
Somewhere night is falling