Doug Anderson: Six-thirty AM

And the black lines the trees made at sundown yesterday

in one direction now point the other, saying

see what you missed in your life that was there all the time.

I thought of people I knew in my young swagger,

whose names I can’t remember, who cared for me

and I didn’t care back (how the mind remembers these things

suddenly, in later years, when one can no longer run as fast

away from self-knowledge to some sensual excess).

And then there are colors between the colors

and different shades of them and that Japanese elm

is wild next to the red-leafed maple—who was it

that wrote her name in the book of poems she gave me

on whatever occasion? These things sting like the tape

the nurse yanks off the healed cut taking hair with it.

The fields are greening themselves without our help

and the willow is blossoming in its gold/green way.

This all happens whether we care or not and is not sad

if we don’t. Something like snow hanging on in May

is sorrowful, and a man with a few years left

saying to the crocus, I lived, I fell in love here.

Vox Populi