The Man on the Raft

The man on the raft
is backlit, like the leaves
on the branches between us,
dark body edged
in gold at the shoulders,
and the hair on his arms,
if we could only
see it, is also gold
this time of day,
this time of year.
He has been sitting for hours
because the day
is not quite over
and he wants to watch it
lessen, go out quietly,
go out beautifully,
not like a light, like a day,
deepening, darkening
like summer skin.

The hour is backlit, finishing,
gilding what had to be.
The broken branch is beautiful
in afternoon, when colors
deepen on their way to fading.
Greens get velvet, moody,
slashed by bones of birches.
The water’s sapphire-colored,
bronze, or platinum,
and everything
is over and done with, all
that’s left is the framing.
And the lapping on the stones,
the dry spume on the planks,

are over, too: day’s ending,
summer’s ending.
Only the love lives on,
the wound that won’t heal,
till the sun decides
to shut things down,
to bring them back loud
and less in the hardness of noon,
relenting a few hours later
so the gash won’t ache
too endlessly.
Say goodbye to today’s
remorse, tomorrow
is already half-
over somewhere else.
And when he stands and stretches
and dives to swim back to the dock,
the man’s head
in the ebony light-
flecked water is only
a node on the rim of evening
where the gold
is starting to fade
into the pinks and reds
and purples of the dome.

The sun is setting: think
of what got added today:
the building, the mating and saving,
made things that took to the moment
as a home for themselves,
piling up layer on layer,
snow lying over ice,
and we trek across it, trying
to keep on the perilous crust.
And think of what leaches down
through the soil into the cistern
that gathers most of the rest:

the waste work, the hate, the hard deaths,
losses that don’t get saved
till all that’s left is a pattern
of shadows on the ground,
the twigs and spume that jostle
next to the mossy rocks,
and the pool of gold collecting
behind the invisible man
swimming in now from the raft
in the white wake of the sun.

The places light is leaving
burn with the brightest fire,
maybe to show they are saving
their unfinished desire.
Or maybe the gold leaf
that edges the highest leaf
signals tomorrow’s claim,
its claw, its offer of grief.

Clouds appear
out of nowhere, wearing
high romantic colors-
mauve, peach, lavender.
Clouds of glory: we
know something about them,
but they have nothing to tell us
about what’s going to come.
Which is why late light is
so condensed and clear:
this is its last chance
for some resemblance here ..
Resemblance-what we stare
into the water for;
but daylight is the thing
that lets it be a mirror.
The man who has spent it all
on the raft tries, swimming back,

but now for him the water
is only flat and black.
A glint might be his reflection,
but there’s no way to know.
Nothing left for him to do
but try again tomorrow.