Published : Monday, October 29, 2007 | Label:   Poems  

I pick up a rock on the lakeshore,
a riverstone the glacier left,
now cleft perfectly down the middle,
a notch at one end.
This is how one feels,
half a self,
bereft.
We are here, perhaps, to look for the rest of who we are,
and that could be anything—
a lake, a range, a woman,
a pink robin,
one’s children,
one day in particular.
Perhaps one is everywhere one looks.

And then a second thought strikes me,
holding the half-rock:
each of us is someone else’s other—
a lost half,
a longing.

I bend and put the rock down among the other pieces of the shore;
I turn, and I am gone.

—Wednesday, 30 November 2005