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Alone on the riverbank

The water cool and clean and swift

Black waters and rapid current

A tenuous communion I cannot name

I have to believe that pain is the teacher

Unable to envision even the barest physical certainties

of the death of myself or those close to me

Living with constant pain

Sharp and thin like a needle

The haze of the forest in early November

An echo from the ageless hills

The quiet country of the past

where weeping is hushed and marches are ended

An apparition in the woodlands at dusk

Touching in thin rooms at dawn's low light

Imprisoned in the subjectivity of my memory

What else can there be?

Drunkenness and some vague lonely nostalgia

for something dead long before my birth

I have to believe that pain is the teacher