Timetable
Somebody dies, for example, or is gone
and then there’s more to pain than pain:
there’s a light within it, without a radiance
that only the skin, and not the eye, can see.
A call goes out: some blue necessity
is ordered up, or at least a magician
to bring some thing out of the nothing that
is present here, and from the woods a whistling
sound occurs, as someone else starts reading
a timetable, or departs, or is staying invisible
just out of town, and then the sky ripens toward
autumn with the flash of heat lightning,
and the apples fall, and a stranger is saying
hello, in an unfriendly way.
