A Poet Reflects

You were a kite of ashes falling
And spreading in air.
There was no one below you …

It would rain
And you would lie
In bed all day wondering

Who fathered the air.
You would listen to your own breath
And think it was no one’s.

You think of snow
The blank page that forgets us,
The strangers we grow into.

Sometimes we burn so cleanly
There is nothing left.

—Larry Levis, excerpts from sections 2, 3, & 4 of “Waking” in The Afterlife  (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998)