Crossing Water / Tony Hoagland

[alwaysashipper.livejournal.com]

In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reeds
that grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side.

It is like going to a florist's shop
you have to take your clothes off to get to,

where nothing is for sale
and nothing on display

but some tall, vertical green spears,

and the small, already half-shriveled pale-purple blossoms
sprouted halfway up the sides of them.

Squatting softly in the cool, tea-colored water,
hearing my own breath move in and out,

leaning close to see the tattered, soft-edged
                                                                 purses of the flowers,
with their downward hanging cones and coppery antennae.

–This is more tenderness than I had reason to expect
from this rude life in I which I built

a wall around myself, in which I couldn't manage to repair
my cracked-up little heart.

Each time I make the trip, I get the strange idea that this
is what is waiting at the end of life–

long stalks slanting in the breeze, then straightening–
flowers, loose-petaled as memory, gray

as the aftertaste of grief.

Tonight, I'll lie in bed and feel the day exhaling me
as part of its long sigh into the dark,

knowing that I have no plan,
knowing that I have no chance of getting there.

I will remember how those flowers swayed and then held still
for me to look at them.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh, nice.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Yes, lovely poem. It's the experiences and not the things, that define us.