This morning the air is cool
almost cold, and sunlight falls
warm on the skin. Down the street
the space between maple trees
is thick and pale with light.

You see, it isn’t the body
and it isn’t the spirit.
Or the body in the spirit
or the spirit in the body,
but the panoply of things
caught up in a single breath.

You see her on these windy
sun-shot mornings,
walking under yellow trees.
You see her on the sidewalk
in her dull pink jacket,
knit cap the color of burgundy.
Her red-tipped cane swings wide
again and again. She moves with
a bearish shuffle step among
the orange leaves in her path -
listens to the hidden world.
And if you meet her face to face,
though she does this less often
than before, she will ask:
Do I know you? Sure,
I know you from somewhere.

Balanced at the gravel margin
of the road, veiled in grey and blue,
his hands are ****** loose around
the bicycle’s white handlebars
in equipoise below his beard’s
feathered fringe. His threadbare jeans
ride up and down at the knees
with the turning of the pedals,
effortless as air. He shows the world
a look of grave surprise, it seems to me -
presents it to a land that never was his own,
but one that he is only passing through.
Roadside cottonwoods and maples
shield him from the skimming sun,
and overhead a skein of Canadian geese
call and call.