10.13.2020

it makes me turn away in shame for those who waste their love

This is the place where one could cast it all 
in the abyss—the selfishness and pride, 
the casual indifference, or just 
oneself. Two aging bikers stop—a man, 

a woman—cut their engines, and resume, 
before they even look around, the quarrel 
they gave up briefly on the road. It makes 
me turn away in shame for those who waste 

their love. A stone dislodged slips slowly down, 
then by its own momentum frees itself 
and plunges through the scraggly juniper 
along the cliff side, pinging boulders high 

above the river, then descending, deep 
and finally invisible, at rest, 
perhaps with grass that pearls along the slope, 
or in the water’s sinuous, green truth. 

No fall can free me thus, not even death, 
from the morass of acts, a tangled net 
cast retrospectively. The only way 
goes past the drop-off, upwards, toward the blue 

San Juans, in sunlight, and Grand Mesa’s prow, 
which tacks among the clouds and sweeps its way 
across, proposing new departures, knots 
cut through, great roadsteads, and immense desires. 

[Catharine Savage Brosman {1934- } "2" from ‘A Colorado Suite’, in Breakwater: Poems]

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