DARK COATS
Bright as a red dress on
a drab street to the eye
I was once to the stopped
moment when she, as I,
saw others in a mist
of dark coats going
to and from work or at
Christmas time in and out
of shops alone trying
to find right presents in
a world that was not right,
someone lost or gone.
Now I, as she, the one
gone, not a flash but bar
of cloud after the red
has gone from the sunset
before moonrise, after
the bird has disappeared
from the horizon, settled
in the pond’s tall grass.
The one who hears the fly
before death, though we are
not dying, who on the trip
home (cause long ago
ended), watches from modern
windows the quiet fields
passing, fallen into
the colors that sleep there.
—from Rattle #30, Winter 2009
__________
Trent Busch: “I wrote ‘Dark Coats’ many years ago; I do not remember the circumstances, thus increasing my pleasure at what to me is a situation wonderfully sad. Surprised by joy, I view it now not as a writer but a reader, and hope it, as all my poems, is not crippled by relevance and time.”
