It Was Only Two Years Ago

I will never ride this train back from Michigan without thinking of you and how you died--something about the long trip back after identifying your body in the morgue, something about repeating the journey, and all the hours for such sorrow and regret: the golden light of dried grasses in the empty lots of Detriot, how it's a kind of resurrection, the return to meadow.  At the top of a bare tree, a Cooper's hawk stares at military attention--a meal might yet reveal itself. A little later a dozen, two dozen deer bound across a field of last year's mown corn, the white arrows of their tails, maidens fearful of the monstrosity on the tracks, but the swans don't care, each one by itself, swans seen from the window of this train, I am on the way home. In inlets, in silvery pools at dusk they are the illegitimate sons of the moon, come down to this world to sip from our cold waters, which are not the waters of forgetfulness, in fact just the opposite of that.