One passed through,
a future poet who’d eaten a pig
and drunk a barrel of wine
all on his own
when his mother died
thus slipping the nets of office
and of war
“I would rather face the edge of a drawn sword,
than serve this slanderous court!”
The roads of the world roam up and down,
he wrote,
but cover no great distance.
I waved him through.
*
And another,
a bony man
who thought that the rivers might be gods –
how little he knew
I thought!
but how much he felt,
despite himself.
I think about him
formally robed in his culture’s sorrow,
outlined like a tree on the evening clouds
as he chanted, heading
down, dark, to the valley,
and what next meeting?
*
Also a woman,
upright,
who knew where she’d come to,
being a good old friend of quiet and shame.
She scrutinized a bee.
“You might think
this is my husband!”
she smiled.
A carriage came,
she left
