The view from where I sat was of a street above a canyon,

And the story was a melodrama with a cast of four.

The subject was an ordinary way of life, defined by principles

I'd usually ignore, and messages that came to me in

Yet now and then I'd have a dream in which a feeble light was visible beneath my door,

And unfamiliar voices mumbled in the kitchen; and then I'd wake up in a sweat

And feel the language closing in like traces of the people who'd been

Close to me at different stages of my childhood,

Whose undisguised appeal could reach me like a popular song,

Directly and without any hesitation; or like a movie,

Strong and sentimental, filled with images of faces I could feel.

--Cut to home: the summer slides away in pages,

Sometimes I sit here, waiting in my mind as in the

Theaters where I'd watched them gravitate across the screen,

Vacant beneath the skin, projecting the emotions they were made to feel

And breathing in the atmosphere of infantile

In the lyrics of a song accompanying a private tune, the argument concealed in a lament

--Although I realize no argument can bring them back to me,

Or let me speak to them again. I sit here mulling over moments

With the flesh scooped out, the impulse spent

Imagining her abandoned house, immense and uninhabited

And filled with silence and the sound of birds, its rafters open to the weather,

Dust motes floating through the air that X and Y had breathed

--Only no one misses them, and no one cares.

The private ones still hurt. But publicly, a sort of calm prevails,

As a door bangs, or a car drives past the corner, or overhead a cloud goes sailing by

And gradually their stories disappear like wonderful balloons

Rising straight into the sky, on an August day.