One by one
they are going.

Everyone the sun
shone down on,

everyone the earth grew,
watered, fed, and rooted.

Often they’re gone at once
in a historic storm.

In my life it has been slow
but sure

as drops from a gutter,
and unlike water drying,

dripping faster now.
The sun cannot come out

and slow it to a stop.
This morning I was

at an airport
trying to get from Chappaquidick

back to town.
The man behind the desk

knew of no flights.
He offered me his car

and reaching for his keys, shuffled
some photos into view—

kids at the beach, I recognized
myself! My mother young as me

now, my father, alive, and rising
from the water,

my name caught in his throat,
and drops caught shining

in his nest of chest hairs,
and I am snorting water

like my daughter at the pond,
and freckled, and it’s the present still,

the kind, astonished man behind the desk,
my current haste,

and here’s my father’s brother,
we are buoyed

by the waves,
so weightless that I wake.

Restored. To carry
lightness in my body

just a while longer
please.

To place it in the scales
against the weight that is

the friend returning home today
for hospice.

The lightness at the windows
eats away at the lightness

inside, as things with mass
begin to push

all those without
away.

Restored,
remember.

No balance
but to repeat

the feeling, being alive
under the same sun once

into this day, which will be overcast
I see,

the sun invisible for now,
above us equally.