...may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy - Charles Wright

There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?

It’s good to know certain things:
What’s departed, in order to know what’s left to come;
That water’s immeasurable and incomprehensible
And blows in the air
Where all that’s fallen and silent becomes invisible;
That fire’s the light our names are carved in.

That shame is a garment of sorrow;
That time is the Adversary, and stays sleepless and wants for nothing;
That clouds are unequal and words are.

Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death.
Our days an uncertainty, a chaos and shapeless,
all that our lives are
blurs down, like a landscape reflected in water.