The arrival.
From many boats, ferries, and borrowed canoes,
white steamers and resurrected hulls in which
we were young together to assure older than waiting
and our feet bare on the wet shadowed sand
early in the evening of every verb, both of us
at the foot of the mountain laughing now
will you lead me with the smell of almonds
up over the leafless mountain in the blood-red evening?
Now we pull up the keel through the rushes on the beach.
My feet miss the broken bottle half buried in the sand,
you did not notice it at last.
Now will you lead with your small hand
your child up the leafless mountain
past the green wooden doors thrown away
and abandoned shelters into the meadows of loose horses
that I will ride in the dark to come?