Nearing Solstice

Near the end of the year, I remember the poet
who looked out over withered fields and saw 

his dreams stlil wandering. Which is perhaps
to say he was not done with dreaming 

or with every difficult relationship marked 
like bruised hills and copper sunsets, branching 

trees, a thousand reiterations of rain. 
I want to ask him how to hold hands 

with the ghosts of our undoing even while 
everything we love lies down in the dirt.