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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.