In The Country

When I was
eighty-two,
I went to live alone
knowing the money would
forever be coming.
Going away felt appropriate
for a man my age.
The closest analog
to the womb
and to death.
To be alive,
clothed in the
warmth of certainty
amid my own unchallenged opinions
during the age of ending,
out of the business
of a bright, moving planet
my own part in the world
outdated and roots
severed.

I found a place
in the middle of the trees
with a thin asphalt egress
that made it easy
to cycle to the village.
I was surrounded by
the aliens of the earth
with their secret languages
and concentrated lives.
I truly lived among strangers,
not those wanting to know me
or able to know me.
It was like the world
before I opened my eyes.
It was here and far away.

Delivered here in a storm
under which the taxi
and me
and the driver
were as tiny as sugar molecules.
The driver introduced himself as Charles.
He is a black man from Aruba,
Charles an English royal name.
I ran to the door
holding a newspaper on my head
as Charles soaked himself
carrying my black bags.

I lived
high among
the canopy of trees,
a place eternally
wild, a nobody cares
zone. I watched
what I had no right to see,
secrets of the birds and squirrels,
the blossoms, the spiders and flies.
I woke up sheltered,
my window hanging in shadow.