Michael Goldman
THE ACCEPTANCES
No, you cannot understand the acceptances,.
how easily they receive each other's talks,
how the lamps are lit as by a faithful reviewer
hurrying home early in the first snowflakes!
Little scenes of the winter tumble past you,
richly colored pages waving and signalling
we once were white.
You are their audience,
and your bafflement is like a summer cold.
Every emotion is easy though baffling,
easy as sneezing is every birth and death,
and why shouldn't conversation be easy?
But it is hard to imagine next year's weather
and you find it must be hard to speak.
Into a silence sustained as the muscles in the chest
of a great singer sustain one note and then another
a flash of static reaches with the acuity
of a long strip of paper being torn. The death
which grows up everywhere around you
has its real purpose in approaching.
