All of it changes at evening

                                   equal to the darkening,

                          Linda Gregg, "Different Not Less"

I come more often now at dusk, when it seems easier to enter into not just reverie but reverence, the grace and gratitude I feel now but could not then.  Come not to be alone but because I am, neither lonely nor lost, simply reconciled to what brings me here now and will again a last time.

                                       in the last light

                                       stones and songbirds

                                       deepen the distance

Geese huddled in the rutted puddled road beside their pond, this quiet darkening not the closing in of rooms but the opening of the  water, lengthening into the familiar distance I know is still there but disappearing, taking it on faith, and I can let my thoughts and memories and regrets go out across it and believe in their going on, if not quite forever, at least farther than the limits of light.

                                       cemetery stars

                                       still seeing the ones

                                       that have died

A little light on the water, and I think too of Li Po, setting his poems adrift on the river; and now the geese, by some unspoken assent, leaving the road, entering the stones, each all in a row, one by one, alone and together.

                                       leaving a little

                                       of itself behind

                                       wind on the pond