Your letter waits on the breakfast table
after you’ve gone—gray scribbles on
creased paper weighing my hand like
stone as I read the question
you could only ask this way,
sparing us more charade, more comic silence.
I think, if I listened better,
I might have heard your question long ago
in your hand’s touch, your gently swaying moods,
your talk of other things.
Now that I read it, my laughing answers
lose themselves in a wider mystery,
as when by a wooded lake
in boyhood I sent the flat stones skipping,
watching them dance on the water’s windless sheen
until, one after another,
the dark depth swallowed them.
I cannot tell you where I have come from,
or why I am here, or where I go,
questions to which I’m only a little less stranger,
which, with each year, I’m more disposed to let rest
and sink in the depth they ride.