A scrawny old old man
(scarred, bowed down, hounded by
uniformed officials and
safe people afraid to meet his eye)
(was he possibly
a fugitive? certainly in seclusion he
sometimes nonetheless
had friends who came with food
and hoped to hear him rise and toast the king!)
that old old man
wrote me a letter.
How it found its way though
from the last-ditch,
vigilant custody,
and by how many hands,
I cannot grasp. And yet it
has found its way, long afterwards,
to this unlikely megalopolis.
Now I am also aged
in as peculiar a community
as his there must have been.
More than my eighty years had
wracked his bones.
Yet he writes
forceful and drastic words with
the clarity of sealight over high
sheltering shores.
Suppose that chunk, that crater-gouging
comet collides with us,
will you say then — with him in his extremity —
‘The tide of joy, never at ebb, still
surges through us too towards
new coasts, a new completedness’?
What he said, so say I.