Joy Ladin

J o y   L a d i n

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While You Were Away

Spring fingered trees between nightly freezes.

Phones didn’t ring. Hawks built nests. Bombs

programmed to distinguish

tyranny from freedom

fell in a distant desert. The world

grew wider, warmer, more dangerous,

more densely cross-referenced

with emptiness. Another ocean

deepened between us. Love,

mine and yours and ours,

sank and surfaced and learned

to live on what it isn’t.

Departure

The bus driver wedges Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit

between dashboard and window.

A girl chuckles. Lots of students on this route,

a crowd that gets the joke.

The dialectic ripens, age in youth, eternity

in sweet September breeze

cool as undrunk tea. Here, summer's waving goodbye,

but near the bottom of the world

days are growing longer. Now that my life is almost over,

I wish I'd been better, more dialectical in my contradictions,

like that tree over there, spinning light into sugar,

or the girl exhaling dioxide as laughter, or the bus

filling with unfulfilled lives

to carry from here to there.