browser life

A really moving and (for me) relevant poem, courtesy of the Journal of SolemnDragon (her site is on my links list)....

evening song
Friday June 24, @06:53PM
scattered like rain
we fall in other places
than each other's,
and like water, run together
  shameless in the clustering of wings
that is our minds together on the page

but this is not the song i came to tell.
There's more to the meadow now,
and this is where the shadow seems to start,
this is where the evening makes things holy,
this is what i saw
while i was silent, in the pleasant, lonely dark.

i am not as accidental as i was.
I no longer rise unweighted
to meet the landscape,
no longer stretch my arms
like palm leaves, unconcerned,
up toward the sun.

But there are other prizes to be had.
The slow unblinking curve of heavy moon,
the wise fog creeps over the ground
and i start to remember.
The way my grandfather probably remembered,
when he grew too old to chase us,
grew so frail
that the shape of his ancestors started showing through.

I remember my mother's father:
round face, like my uncle.
A cane-
a cane, we used to dance with, i recall-
our skipping feet
circling the prop of his age and loss of power.
We couldn't know:

Age has a way of slowing objections,
but opening eyes.
The way of thinking that ends in growing wise
is not thinking at all,
but finally starting to see.

And as pages brush by,
wings of fast-drawn ink,
i feel myself
finally starting to narrow,
i feel the days creeping in
and making their home
in the joints of my bones where the water
won't easily flow.

My ancestors start to show through,
and my hands get tired,
but the fields i once rushed past
are larger now,
the growing fronds of summer
larger in leaf-
the greener world is more
than i remember,
when i was green.

Maybe this is where the shadow starts:
Maybe this is where the meadow leads.