A Wall Between Two Gardens

After one sadness comes another in its place,

a different-but-the-same sadness,

a sadness like a mound of spectacles and shoes,

that was once the promise of a borrowed dollar.

Sadness, and its dirty grey rainbow,

the attending flies of introspection,

a perpetual falling down of things

beyond our purview or administration.

I call sadness the troll, back-bender,

poor-provider, hole-of-the-soul,

kitten-in-a-blizzard, bird-on-the-road.

A constant companion, sadness is

the little nabob who never was.

I've made a church for it

out of these two hands

so we may hang our heads and low

at the black sun in my heart.

I'm put in mind of a Christmas long ago,

of a lover lost in a time storm.

I see myself reaching for the morning star,

unaccepting of the bewildering distances.

Sadness is a doll found down a well,

a letter pinned to the back of a drawer,

the hunger pangs of a million children.

It mopes under the willows.

Sadness coaxes, coerces, cajoles.

At its kernel is the art of atonement.

A babe in the woods or puzzlement,

I think sadness may be music among sorrows.

It's a wolf looking at a mirror

and not liking what it sees therein;

the onrushing gales of its extinction.