why do we say ‘so long’ when saying
goodbye not knowing if it will be
so long or good or who knows when
until we see again we’re here and know
ourselves inviolate yet of a time
shorter now than the length now past
held in abeyance until it’s tolled
by breath then silence forever so long
as days as weeks the unknown years
lay down their eons like stepping stones
in a river subsumed by its own flow
we ford but nimble thirsting wary
as deer lined up at water’s edge
drinking reflections carried on
cold lively currents rapids untold
then falls a soft eddy the river so long
.
we find ourselves by what we find
to be sufficient in the truth we tell
ourselves a past forever shaped
in versions probable yet still forced
to know and recognize the living day
remains untrammeled marching forth
unforeseeable the point at which
we end beyond and nothing to say
just where what starts or what begins
except our past cohered and wound
upon itself like a spool its thread
unraveling slowly all that’s sewn
together as patchwork a comfort quilt
explaining us maybe or one another
no matter the fabric frayed and how
we’ve bought it the whole nine yards
.
every day and this day are an echo
of another past that’s passed or living
still somewhere inside us caught up
with waiting for what we know is here
a sell-by date stamped and yet ignored
since everything in the end is spoiled
by tears or heartache packaged sealed
as what we want yet cannot have
irredeemable always still composed
wholly of desire arrowing through
a haze of days toward waiting sleep
to keep alive upright the pulse
of dawn a wash of waking color
amid the verdant inchoate need
for bearings found beneath the sun
as each new day echoes another
.
had we a hope we’d hope for more
mist-veiled fields effulgent wet
and cardinal song the finches darting
hedge-shy sparrows chickadees fitful
or this fresh morning unfiltered soft
with last night’s rain its extant breath
of remnant fog we breathe in tasting
the air not there its window lens
revealing gray hills rising to shift
perspective toward that far-off deep
hope knows the opening toward
something unknown there and seen
perhaps empyrean though certainly not
forgotten easily the lambent meadow
this noontide steeped the sun traversing
wind-rippled fields a sea of grass
.
what we had more of we have no more
stripped as we are of what we have
gainfully wasting the time that remains
paid dividend of a past no longer
the future we always thought to be
fit legacy of all we have earned
yet knew in passing all that was
would be in the end the end we made
while captive to a sinking boat
we abandon to an ocean that fills
this leaky vessel we try to row
through rising chop cold salty waters
the ebb and flow of our conveyance
ultimately beached on riptide shores
no more the horizon no more the deep
blue distance of no more no more
.
it is a good day to die is
what courage utters or isn’t
supposedly the point now being
the end we know must come is here
because it is because foreseen
untethered of the sun’s slow roving
this portal green its leafy rustle
azure expanse and nimbus cloud
indelible until it’s not but is
what we remember and thereby call
our lives to witness in the letting go
of what’s to come that has not been
redoubled and vivid dwelling within
memory’s dark cathedral hold
propelling us blindly ever forward
toward time’s shadow without a prayer
.
the world is simply there it is
this strange despite an eyelid’s blink
oddly funereal that raincloud swollen
while leveled and gone the grassy song
pregnant with pause then lightning crack
soon followed by the up-sway down
of rainfall scudding our twilit meadow
its ragged reach soon saturate
only to give way again
to orioles katydids the meadowlark
piping next morning bright trills
set loose aglow and sunlit wet
with all those grasses rising up
lupins daisies queen of the prairie
precarious bent amid the storm
arriving again the light so strange
.
rest with the knowledge rest and know
nevermore nevertheless they are the same
and drive our reckoning here and now
the time still left us still beyond
all the need for all that has been
slowly unwinding toward the unseen
predicate finitude swallows at evening
looping figure eights above the sheen
of a pond in autumn the rising cold
layered light infused with water
silvered over with the sky’s expanse
ourselves reflected for a while
before the dusk softly curtains
hills pond shore the water’s surface
emptied of swallows pale starlight
arriving unheard beyond the rest
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 3.
Peter Filkins has previously published five books of poetry, most recently Water / Music (Johns Hopkins, 2021) and The View We’re Granted (Johns Hopkins, 2012). His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The New Republic, Yale Review, Harper’s, and The American Scholar. The recent recipient of a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and NEH Public Scholars Award, he is currently at work on a biography of the Austrian poet and fiction writer Ingeborg Bachmann that will appear from Yale UP.
See all items about Peter Filkins