Nearness

Let’s get it straight-out,
the un-straight gist of it,
wabi-sabi homeliness of things
I love,

the crack that opens bronze
or skin to age,
or how the sky dies into us
at evening or dawn
through just such breaks.

The void through which
we see all things
is our eyes. They crack
with the paintings trying
to say what was under the centuries,

breathing, timeless, bodies
lined up like mirrors in Versailles,
a girl on a swing, a radio whisper
on a beach almost inhuman again,
a last view of children in a park,
the way we become images

which crack. The way we see
even the present through cracks

in time and space, those neighbors

who watch each other and smile

but never truly speak.