Collection of Endings

from Phillip Levine's News of the World

I had to put one foot in front of another,
hold both arms out for balance, stare ahead,
breathe like a beginner, and hope to arrive.

a tiny me taking nothing, giving
nothing, empty, and free at last.

Even a child knows the meaning of rain:
it is the gift of October, a gift
that arrives on time each autumn
to darken the makeshift shacks and lighten
the hillside with a single splash of color.

That afternoon I walked the crowded streets
looking for something I couldn't name,
something familiar, a face or a voice or less,
but not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.

I can lie awake in the dark
rehearsing all the trivial events
of the day ahead, a day that begins
when the sun clears the dark spires
of someone's god, and I waken
in a flood of dust rising from
nowhere and from nowhere comes
the actual voice of someone else.

Above the cries of seagulls, the message comes
translated into the language of water and wind,
decipherable, exact, unforgettable, the same
words we spoke before we spoke in words.

.....................................If we're quiet
we might hear something alive
on the move through the dusty alleys
or the little abandonded parks, some-
thing left behind, the spirit of the place
welcoming us, if the place had a spirit.

--------------------------If he came
to my door now on his trek
to nowhere I'd welcome him back
with black wine and black bread,
a glass of tea, a hard wood floor
to sleep on, and hope the new say
brought him the music of silence.

Yusel Prisckulnick,
I bless your laughter
thrown in the wind's face,
-------
for all the sea taught
you and you taught me:
that the waves go out
and nothing comes back.

Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.

............................Perhaps no
one is calling and it's only
the voices of the air as
the late light of June hangs on
in the cottonwoods before
the dark whisper the last word.

so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.