In spring I was born and I stood and watched
an arid landscape, indeed,
pale dust meeting suddenly
a single drop of water
a gray sky, as wide as those gray eyes,
the perfect storm.
Then with a rush, April showers poured over me as I stood,
and I could not bear the noise. I whispered
you cannot take this out of me, to ears that never heard.
The soft ground I had known turned to mud.

Summer came when the gray evaporated,
asserting its presence with bare heavy heat and blinding light.
I fought a weight that pushed me down,
but somehow pulled green things up from the ground towards the sky.
The hours were months from sunrise to sunset.
Sounds, from a distance, as if time was laughing,
sounds in my sleep, I struggled to follow.
Through dull numbness, slowly, it came to me
that something
was not right.

By Autumn I was no longer standing
I’d fallen to my knees
rustling red and orange leaves brushed over me like a fiery challenge to an approaching chill, only echoes
of something behind that had mattered.
Only echoes in emptiness, now.
The gray came again, settling on me as death on an old man
suitably, gracefully, I felt no fear.
Cold phantoms brushed across my cheeks and through my hair
I lifted ready eyes up to the fading light.

And it came, winter.
Cold air lifting the dullness of summer,
leaving me exposed to sharpened visions of realization.
Vivid and cool white, the touch of affectionate finger tips.
Icy breaths repeated to a slowing pulse to life
Everything quickly becoming clear and defined in the falling darkness.
and as I looked out from deepening black to that world moving away from me
I smiled, for this peace,
at last
at the end.