I
"Death is also the thief of beauty," he says,
as a slow disquietude replaces morning's calm.
The pink light fades from ashen clouds,
and an icy luminosity begins to wax
above the highlands of eternity.
The willow, weeping all evening over rocks
beside the pond, darkens to an arch hunched
above a wafer of sacramental light,
a fallen moon too faint to give much sight.
There were minds which might have ripened into suns
had not the body failed, the nursing vine
sallowed and withered before the fruit was ripe.
We are flowers of light in a field of darkness,
brief in our pulse of generations. We open
and close, wax and wane, open and close.