Only could we gaze at the stars forever, surrounded by big black night, that resembles
Something of water
perhaps we could flow backward through time, somewhere to an isle of a planet distant.
You said, sitting on an old bench by the lake,
All I can feel is the old leaves bristling at my feet,
I did try to listen more to the silence
than to the sound
You said, somewhere beyond those trembling lights,
on a silent island adrift on big blue-black emptiness,
might we find a stranger still remembering us, or looking back to us.
Do they call each other by their names? do they have names at all?
or perhaps only by pronouns,
the way I call you you,
and you call me you,
until all names dissolve to the sound of breath
That will be lost in the vast atmosphere.
Do they bury the ones who left first into the soil?
As we once buried our dog in the yard,
pressing hard on the ground so that water won’t seep in.
Are they made of water too,
when they die, do they return to water too?
Only could we watch the light of eternity all our lives,
that our eyes can travel this distance
from an isle to another side of the boundary,
Might we see the ones who lived long ago—
In a lighthouse standing alone on the sea,
an old man by the humble dinner table
That he has taken as the fate long ago
lighting a damp candle, swallowing sorrow,
adding one more flame to the cosmos—
a signal that refuses to die
on the deck of a wrecked ship:
a sign telling that he lived once.
He was once this shaped form of water, once of flame,
once of dust, and that he did walk on the water,
just before melting into the seas.
That light will exist somewhere.
Every farewell we share, every agony we bear, every rain we drank
will reflect on the surface
of the quiet lake somewhere,
surrounded by nothing but rock and tall trees,
and, one night, may reflecting back to us again.
It is like the love only the memory keeps:
gone, and yet still shining.
Somewhere out there, someone, and farther still, another—
if they too are willing to gaze into the eternity of the lights,
then even after we have walked away from this lake,
Walking back to the wood,
touching the stars in vain,
somewhere in the vastness of space,
we still talking all over the nights
autumn leaves falling into the lake, endlessly