POEM - You Begin

This is how it happens:
How a dog-eared evening
With a long, sad face
And wrinkled clothes
Reminds us that temporary things
Must be temporary.

How boulders are turned into stones;
How comedy and tragedy become history;
How we become strangers all over again.

It feels like tiredness;
It stretches on and on like insomnia;
It is as relentless as absence
Yet, oh how it transfigures everything!

First: It does so without malice.
Second: It does so without conspiracy.
Third: It does so without blaming anyone.

So rake the leaves back onto the trees
If it helps you;
Buck up and stiffen the soft horizon;
Push back the killing frost
And hold the hunter moon at abeyance:
The trees and the plants and the farmers
Will not mind one bit.

But I swear, this is how it happens,
This is how it starts
And where would I be in you otherwise?

M C Biegner
11/2005