Darkness Visible 1 (2000)

Darkness visible when the woman
he didn’t know looked away.
Like the cool breeze which follows
sudden sunlight on the creek
or the underside of a sparrow’s wing
frightened off by your approach.
The heart turns both ways at once,
its walls permeable and true
only in alternation. The way grief
inlays the day with its mother-of-pearl,
translucent and gorgeous in
handing us too much to bear.
A woman I didn’t know glanced
and then looked away, and that was all:
A possibility perfect only in that chance,
brief, passing and now lost moment,
breaking me open with all the fervor
of bread fresh from the oven.
Darkness in how quickly she passed
into the fading dusk of memory,
a bell in an distant orchard
ringing thin but clear just after
the moon breaks like a heart to the west.