Still Life¶

To live slow enough to hear the sun,
watch its symbols slide across your bedroom
on a lazy afternoon spent seeing
shadows rise and fall over sheets,
no music this, but something else
more steady, more staid, and ancient
as if there were ways to know an afternoon
deep in your gently warming bones:
another breakthrough to the peace
of slow things, like gravity and grasshoppers
and the pot of wilting flowers you stumbled on
in a graveyard where you knew yourself, finally,
to be loved and to love in a language a lot like the sun’s,
made of shadow words and heat and patience
all pointing at a peace past understanding.