The poem
Then the air was perfect. And his descent to the white earth slowed. Falling became an ability to rest--as
the released breath believes in life. Further down it snowed,
a confusion of slow novas which his shoes touched upon, which seemed as he fell by
to be rising. From every small college and rural town: the clearest, iced blossoms of thought,
but gentle. Then the housetops of friends, who he thought had been speaking of his arrival, withdrew, each from another.
He saw that his friends lived in a solitude they had not ever said aloud.
Strangely he thought this good.
The world, in fact, which in these moments he came toward,
seemed casual. Had he been thinking this all along?
A life where he belonged, having lived with himself
always, as a secret friend.
A few may have seen him then. In evidence: the stopped dots of children & dogs, sudden weave
of a car-- acquaintances, circling up into the adventure they imagined. They saw him drop
through the line breaks and preciousness of art
down to the lake which openly awaited him. Here the thin green ice allowed him in.
Some ran, and were late. These would forever imagine tragedy
(endless descent, his face floating among the reeds, unrecognized), as those
who imagine the silence of a guest to be mysterious, or wrong.