Jim Greenhalf
On a hot July evening at the end of the century
Everything I see will outlive me -
a quote from Anna Akhmatova I read by chance
on a hot July evening at the end of the century,
sweating on the leaves of All of Us,
Raymond Carver’s collected poems.
Lazy with heavy heat, the laburnums,
laurels, the copper beech which sounds like the sea.
Smoking by the window I thought, without fuss,
Carver wrote his stories and poems
then died, leaving them behind.
Everything he thought and felt, every
extraordinary moment the order of things
fell like a wave into place, he put into words
and left them behind. Outside my window
these trees were planted by a man
who may not have lived to see them grow.
Their sound in rain and wind
outlives his anonymity;
the pleasures he had to forego are mine.
There is a kind of comfort in that.
Perhaps the things I leave behind
may do as much for someone I do not know.
I like to think that God will be kind
to Ray and Anna and, ultimately, me
when everything outlives my consciousness.
And on a hot July evening to come
someone sitting by this window
will look out at the copper beech
and hear the sea’s sound, in the century
whose end I will not live to see.
Page(s) 88
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