The lakefront stills, assembling itself.
Ghosts I abandoned, and by abandoning believed
Had left me, return to convene again by the shore.
Their music begins, and more than anything,
The single wish to merge it with my own.
More than anything, the one desire to remain here,
Watching the wind-bent tiger lilies on the bluff
Mirror the strange, orange flesh of carp
Descending and resurfacing below...
Watching the hammock, its rope worn to threads,
Rise up in the wind, flagging from a single tree.
More than anything, to know at last a beauty that sublimes
Beyond what we can only call beauty,
An order that through order defers to the one sound:
These waves breaking tidelessly against the shore.
These voices, melancholy and remote.
My own voice, carried back to me by a wind
That takes only what it needs, and that needs only
The slightest beckoning to bring us here again.
The slightest beckoning: a chord within a song,
Rising up from and returning back to nothing.