a long goodbye 3

Dear Friend, I fancy meeting you in a very crowded street in an intersection of peoples when the red light turns green and everyone including ourselves rush forward to our own elsewheres. 

The preciseness of things will allow us not to see each other unlike the way one morning on a particular June day I met again at once four people in a corner paces away from ---. 

One I was with about two years in my early twenties with no love lost between us at parting. One met in the late twenties leg of whitewashed paintings. Another through her large scales paintings of cats and flowers. The fourth mere hours from an airport. 

What are the chances we meet again? Together in a spot as if rehearsed sometime somewhere. If at ten dreaming in California someone tells us we will commit suicide at 26 and have PhD at 36 and then be half way around the world bearing a kind of slowness of

Being, that there will be sunshine and sea and we will wonder if this is still life or dream. Why should we not fancy multiverses where in another life some things did not happen and all these merely a child's wondering. A child still must be dreaming elsewhere 

On a bed with starships taped on the ceiling and midmorning flooding in a roomful of books. Or must it be a dog, one of the hundreds of strays in a Catholic country with least love for the least. I fancy hectares of land where dogs run and not only dream. When I move 

From one place to another and meet people and memorise faces in spite myself I fancy meeting them again in another life. One where hurriedly passing the crisscrossing pedestrian lines we are less estranged from ourselves.

a long goodbye 2

Are we not merely a passing?
A mere body of memory
That dissolves inevitably
Into traces? Even the earth 
That keeps us in its bosom

Means to erase us, compost
Of nothing significantly
Important, if only for a moment
There in that briefest
Brief encounter: soul meeting

In timid attempt at love,
Immortality, that kind of song
Praising our own slow passing.
We have given it a name:

Life. Love. Living. Song.
Poetry. Your name. Mine.
Others we know of. All of us
Mere passing, remembering
Each other in hopes of staying.

A long goodbye

I have few weeks left before final leave-taking.
These weeks pass in slow motion but pass they do 
Just the same. The list of things to do has 
A certainty in it: the number of banks, the emails, 

The visits to dentist, and barber whom I will see 
Twice more before having to find someone like him
Again in another country (though I doubt it

Someone who already knows, by seeing me, 
Exactly what to do). A poem has been written about 
Having the same barber throughout one's life, 

A kind of faithfulness and understanding of being.
I anticipate on the last visit the appearance 
Shall be the same though I tell him 

To cut as short as possible and he might wonder 
But not ask. The scissors and blade will move
In the same way. The look on the mirror 

And the sound of "thanks", the tip before the door 
The same. Of the list, only the dentist will know 
From the way a tooth submits to certainties.

This sunshine

It will be shy of three months time. 
The day set, traveling the wires
Paper to paper, what fate.

I thought it will be like floating.
While away time on placid waters.
She wakes up in time for office 

Plants a quick kiss, I get up later 
At sunup to walk the dogs, running
To leave what behind, moving towards

What waits ahead in time, in space.

               * 

The world too large, we have only
Such life. The dog who survived
Inner city to become part of home

Offered a rat she wrestled this morning.
Dead on its back at the front door.
What is not allowed to pass.

We picked up a snail making its way
Crossing the road and let it 
At the side by the grass and puddle.

               *

Over here, a butterfly comes to visit
The lemon on the sapling 
We bought at the market three Sundays ago.

Three Sundays from now, a despedida.
What must be, must be done in celebration.
Bring in the wine and the photos

Posterity. No one gets left behind.

                *

She and I recently painted the front door 
Yellow and called the place Sunshine,
What is constant in this country.