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.