This poem is called--
I don't say much between poems because I'm afraid.
This poem is called "Wake Up."
"The road down from everything even
you had hardly dared to hope for has its lonely stretches, yes.
But it's hard to feel alone entirely.
There's a river that runs beside it the whole way down,
and there's an over-song that keeps the river company.
I'm leaves, you're the wind.
I used to think the song had to do with the leaves' confusion.
The wind letting up.
They're mistaking this for something
like courtesy on the wind's part, or even forgiveness.
But leaves don't get confused.
Silly to think it.
And what can leaves know of courtesy, let alone
forgiveness?
What's forgiveness?
Wake up, for the falconer has lost his falcon.
He has heard that falcons are like memory, they come back.
But not all memories do.
Not all memories should.
If anyone knows this, it's the falconer.
How long ago that was.
Yet, all the varieties of good fortune
he's come upon, as a hand comes idly
upon an orchard's windfalls.
How different he's become since.
None of it matters when the falconer steps back into memory
as into a vast cathedral, which is to say, when he remembers.
How cool it is inside the cathedral.
And, at first, how dark.
Soon though, he can see a chapel set aside for prayers
specifically to the Virgin, whose story he's always
resisted.
He sees a corner where people have lit candles, sometimes
for another's suffering, sometimes for their own.
He sees the altar with the falcon sitting on top of it.
The weight of grief over what's lost,
versus the shadow of what's lost,
forever struggling to return and failing.
Who can say which is better?
The falconer's eye meets the falcon's eye.
'I have a story,' the falcon says.
Seems to.
The wings lifting, the feathers rippling
with the story's parts.
'I have a story.
I can't wait to tell you.'"
Falcons, cathedrals.
It's what comes from living next door to a cathedral.
And falcons landing in your yard.
Often.