Seeing Through Things

The city glows and grimaces; breezes
knife through autumn's purple, turncoat leaves
dead months early from Dutch Elm disease.

Temperatures cool the light's brief blaze.
Each thing seems numerical and free: shade
inches west in expandable shapes,

a cold front swings east. And under the green
remnants of summer roils the machine
of infinite leaving, the screen

of yearnings disguised as grief, though we are
no less for it. Decade by decade we dig up our
various longings: a cake baked into the number

of years completed, a zigzag of mountains
traversing the distance, or the sense, when
time is in twos and threes, that morning

insists on seeing through things. When a fraction
of a second creates an infant later, this action
clarifies every sadness and the abstraction

I thought was the sequence of meanings
in no particular order. That and the difficult feeling
of absence turning more graceful, and more routine.

Copyright © 2004 Diane Mehta All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission