The trail gone cold, your voice
asleep in your throat, I thought
I should hurry, not much time to clear
a space in the brush
and how to keep it open, when every
day I saw it closing
like the hollow of a burned
homestead while the clouds
drifted, not yet
clotted, not yet
clay but some allotrope
of the same sand, the same carbon
that made up your life
on Corliss street, copying
notes from one scrap
to another, errands
one step to another.
And I remembered the friend
who’d followed you,
who gave me The Problem of Pain,
and who before I could read it, solved
the problem. Hear me
as the living careen down
the hours with no decay
of the signal that reaches us
only by decay.
Already you’re one of those
who lived long ago.