Having watched him walking away
from the beginning, they know,
as they know a silhouette of cypress
in a marsh wind or the motion
of brown river water under ice,
the set of his shoulders, the gesture
of his stride. Once so near
that every pearl button, every warp
and weft of his apparel could be studied,
he has proceeded daily, his back
turned, to move away, farther
and farther from them, solitary
across the same long field.
He was there for years
every morning, the first thing
they saw, as statuesque as the cold
dawn sun passing through flocking
rice birds, stirring the spiders
in the bittersweet. Often, sitting
on the lawn in the evenings,
they would catch sight of him again,
moving with the same methodical grace
through a maze of fireflies
toward the tightening and knotting
of the new night. Waking later,
peering out their windows at the moon,
they could always discern his receding
figure by the steadiness of his shadow
among the skittery shadows of the clouds
disintegrating over the blowing grasses.
He continues his departure now
through the plush and aromatic foams
of each spring, through the cracking
currents and frozen swells of succeeding
winters, becoming smaller and smaller
as they watch, a broken twig
on the landscape, no bigger
than a pod of sumac, a sparrow print
against the snow, hardly visible,
even though they peruse
the distance with their eyes
strained and shaded.
And don’t they know him completely,
don’t they finally perceive
him fully and most perfectly
during that moment when,
from the far fragmentary
blue sketch of rain on the horizon,
from the desolate, barely
disturbed line of the plain,
from the immeasurably minute
figure of focus remaining
in their eyes, he sinks away
and disappears?
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