Again with Galway Kinnell

I posted this poetic section in my blog back in March of 2006 -- a time where I remember having a premonition of the terrible events of the first of this year. I remember telling Paul on the phone on that evening in March, "I don't think we have as much time as we think we do."

I was getting over a cold. I had my variegated brown sweater on. I'd been on my way out the door to dash down to Paul's home in response to the horrible cold feeling inside me. He called me just as I was about to get in the car, and was a little startled and perplexed and assured me everything was fine, not to worry, don't come rushing down.

I never forgot that evening and I redoubled my efforts to make every moment between us the best I could make it. Please don't anyone forget that your loved ones can be taken from you at any moment.

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

-- Galway Kinnell