A trailing, as if we had walked
up some gentle slope
and now, reaching the mountaintop,
one continues farther into the wilderness?
A mending, as if a ranch hand
dealing with the aftermath
of a winded forest
and a tangle of barbed wire?
In a flash, like a lightning strike
burning up years
of tinder,
old growth?
Or with nothing, like a noble silence
that finally listens.
I am with nothing,
per se.
Post Script
This poem turns around several imagined forms of goodbye: a gradual parting, a difficult repair, a sudden destruction, and finally a silence that is no longer avoidance but attention.
The last phrase, “I am with nothing, per se,” is meant less as deprivation than as emptiness. Taken by itself, no goodbye has a fixed form. Its meaning arises through relation: what was shared, what was damaged, what was remembered, what was never said. In that sense, nothing is not merely absence. It is the empty ground where form depends on everything around it.
Image Credit
Image credit: Barbed wire with snow and ice, Laurens R. Krol, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Primitive Joe 
