the faraway picture

i.
it could be anyone, behind those glasses and it is what is left behind (which is less and thinner than the blades of grass you walked upon and made up stories about) that transfigures, finally. i can't read the names sewn onto your pockets any longer and now, your lips and the words coming out of your lips must be called forth from a very small and hidden canyon of flesh, a white place, surrounded by blood, pulsing by, pulsing by: a location traversed both by ghosts and large molecules, where I can still place a crown upon your head while grasping your fingers, just so. that final act is a kind of magic which is automatically performed, a compulsion to be enacted, much like the drawing up of breath into yourself, while birds announce your late arrival.
ii.
viewed from a distance, there is a richness of details: beauty, authority and the mysterious souls of a dozen animals drift out of your eyes. All approaches, even those linked to the slender rafters of time's passage, whose roof is heaven itself, render those moments, those actions, as intimate outlines, contours that will not be so easily and clumsily filled with color or starlight again.
iii.
and so, on that last day, when summer was headed for triumph and the mountains were green and purple with the season's presence, we captured the rain and poured it out onto the earth. when i hold the faraway picture at arm's length, i imagine that distance to be three thousand miles, and so, see your voice as all of the flowers that have come to fill up that vast and darkened field.