Riding west on the bus from the dry land
east of the mountains
I knew I wouldn’t see you
again for a year or more and out
the window lay those hills
two thousand years of silt blown
down from the glaciers eroding
pale buff but wintry
I was seeing them for the first
time and never would again
never will with your death
now so many years behind
and no reason to go back
to the cropped wheat or to
your wish to be a meadow
with that return cut off in
your life’s own evening
in those rooms in that town
in that car
and the death that you took—
(though we say she took her life —)
never leaves me not in the cells
formed this morning nor those
in the infant night where they
foliate unsensed unseen.