The Last Day in Yosemite

This one is not about you (although it is your birthday without you, again) but you are in it, just like you are in everything.


That last day I meant to finally face up
to El Capitan and size it up from below
but I never did:
just south of Shuttle Bus Stop 7,
I quit the walking path, calculating
(with a sigh) that there wasn't
enough daylight left to walk all the way
and then back to camp. Instead,
I turned into a meadow, right in the heart
of the valley, where suddenly
a hushed silence and an open space
(framed by the towering rocks)
exploded ahead.

I waded through tall deep-green grasses
whose tips rippled with the tiptoeing wind
exactly like a scene in Tarkovsky's "Mirror"
where a man walks down a field when
the wind comes and sends waves through the grass
and he stops and turns around to look back
(don't ask what it means; I couldn't say):
except that here it was me, sitting on a fallen
tree trunk -- an island in an ocean of green --
with everything below Half-Dome's
sun-lit top sinking into the world of shade
at the end of the day.

No one, nothing, no sound,
for who knows how long.

A minimal flutter in the corner
drew my eye: a tiny bird (a chickadee?)
soundlessly flitted by and disappeared among
the branches of a small tree behind.
I turned to look and saw what I somehow didn't see
this entire time: a young deer, quietly grazing,
undisturbed on his turf. I thought Frost,
I thought miracles, I thought wow,
and took it all in with wonder and awe.

Then the sun was gone and it was time
to go, but as I went (with Wordsworth now)
I knew I couldn't have had a more perfect
goodbye.

The Heart of the Matter

He says, "Look, my fingers are SO
shaky," and holds out his hand,
with slightly dirty fingernails
of a 12-year-old.
The living-room light projects
long, pointed shadows
that flutter and float in the vast
whiteness of the wall behind us.
I don't know what to say
but I say something, anything.
His eyes widen with an uncertainty;
his laughter betrays an unease -
but the next moment he's forgotten,
and is pleased about some other thing.

And what is there to say?

That weakness sneaks in early,
already at 12;
that it hits where it hurts the most,
some vacuum, some hole, some
motherless void,
where for a moment -- or longer --
the ultimate frailness,
the singular solitude
of being alive reveals itself
(and dazzles or horrifies)
as the one truth worth trying
to avoid.

The cat catches a whiff of murky thoughts
and saunters over to destroy them: he flips
to his back and shows a soft belly,
demanding an immediate course of action.
In the thickening darkness of a late afternoon,
the boy's fingers, my words and the cat's purrs
(no adjectives used -- I know better)
fill the room and beyond,
and, without a doubt,
become all that matters.