Leaving.

Leaving.              

As if they believed it possible

I might join

their circle of simple, passionate thusness,

their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,

the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I.

                                                                                Only When I Am Quiet and Do Not Speak

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

I was leaving the day

I noticed it, not new

but new to me: a path

to the woods I’d never

taken because it wasn’t
or didn't seem to be

there and in time

the amount of time it took

me to be gone and get

back again, saplings had

rooted up through the once

cleared off moss.  A keener green.

A fresh radiance, timid

in the wind.  A bethel

of crows meet there maybe

before they glide to a field

of corn not come to tassel
yet.  He was late getting it

put in, hoed up.  So they’ll take

what blueberries they can

find and make their way through

the new nave our neighbor's made

with his apathetic skidder.

If I had a day or two

more—if the rain would leave off

—maybe I’d walk up there, past
the tassleless corn, the clutch
of cranberries, the grave
stone for my father (who still

lives mostly alone at home)

and mother (who still waits
mostly alone below

that stone) and into the broken

swale that made while I was,

all these years, off on my own. 
I’d see  all the new shoots, far
enough above my head 

that if it were dark

they’d be sky, fold themselves

over me the way an aching

community would, stoic
in the parade of the respected
dead, finally in their

own home after decades

away.  It's only grass, but
some will lightly kiss, with

fingers on my shoulders,

a decades gone thought

of going off and not

ever coming back.  

And I'll imagine it, but
there will be grips of each
of my two shoulders to bring me
back to myself, and later,
casual buck up backslaps, some

awkward thrusting hugs, 

some stumbling

and some picking up

where I, we, all of us, left off.