But They do not Leave

 They come to me at work, as they often do.
Arms folded. Resilient. What now?
the smallest asks. Now, I say, now this;
now the colourless job and the not talking to anyone
except kids and animals. All my friends have gone
and gone into the deepening gulf above my face.

There are too many things for me to know
but there are things to know better — sole secrecy —
by taking what is near and shrinking it:

I want to remember that next time I walk
the lower path in the woods by the cattle farm
to breathe only through my nose again,
to know that those acorns will blitz everything
under the canopy when the winds beat this valley before
Winter, to see the stump where my son sat, taken back slowly
and the sapling grow in its place, as another
will grow in its. So I surround myself with the things
and people that see every scratch of time —
everything becomes a mirror. Now is this Intimacy.

The slender one asks, And the rest of the world?
The world is already tired on me, I say,
the people, seem to only tear apart from each other
in this culture of abbreviation; everyone is strange to everyone
even though they will all die. I see my older neighbours
drunk, fearing the world, disappearing
soon back into their own hearts, as the blackbird in its perfect
black watches me from the fencepost a metre away. Braver
than the cats, because it knows there is the sky
and the stuck; alive and the other. Knowing
something enough to trust its tears to sing and go unheard
when every scratch has switched tense.