to Victoria Clausi

As for others, maybe they, too, sense an
outline taking shape—to their days, to their
minds—something glimpsed while waiting
for the light to change, for another soul
to finish one more rambling rant exposing
what amounts to existential dread. Maybe
nothing’s coming for any of us—at least
not what we hoped for or expected—and
all this talk we do only forestalls what’s
inevitable. I can’t say. I can’t imagine
what I can’t imagine nor why one person
kicks a back door in, another sings a hymn.
This afternoon I’ve watched leaves falling,
tried to guess the path they’ll take through
swirling winds, tried to see, before the moment
happens, the moment burst forth into what it
will become, each leaf becoming the place
it touches earth. So, too, the mind—it touches
here or there, a struck piano note beginning
one child’s love of sound becoming something
whole to wander through, or else it lingers on
the elegance of one man’s ornate penmanship
encased behind protective glass. I can’t say
what becomes of what a self does not become,
of what the mind, for all the shapes it tests,
cannot discern of what it most desires to know.
Let’s say the truths we seek are found and felt
most fiercely in the simple act of seeking, of
sitting still a while—long enough to let the mind
meander where the moment takes it, whether
down along the gnarled-dense roots of cedars
or out along the farthest lengths of where a hawk
descends. Let’s say the life we know—the one
that is the mind becoming what the moment gifts
and gifts again—is the only one it could become,
the one to lay the whole self
                                                wholly down inside.