User:Arnon Chaffin/Poems

Where Sadness Comes From By Arnon Chaffin Don't go back to say it came from way back when. It did, it did, but now. When you said did just now did you feel a little dip, a curtsey in the middle of the word, almost another syllable but not quite? We like to say a word, a single word can make us feel. There, there it is again, this time a falling down at the end of feel. You feel it, how that little sound goes dropping down and hangs alone. I'm here to tell you I come from a place where hanging used to happen: it happened in the trees, by God, it happens even now in air, the air the mouth lets loose; I hear a hanging all the time. It leaves a sadness in the voice; we speak, and wait for history to catch up with us. It's slow, but then, that lets you hear it coming; you hear it now before you speak, that sadness in your voice, the part of you that wants to last, to hang or dip, to hold the word for just a little more— my people, this is an elegy to you, the sadness in your voice Robert Frost - Meeting and Passing (1874-1963) As I went down the hill along the wall There was a gate I had leaned at for the view And had just turned from when I first saw you As you came up the hill. We met. But all We did that day was mingle great and small Footprints in summer dust as if we drew The figure of our being less that two But more than one as yet. Your parasol Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust. And all the time we talked you seemed to see Something down there to smile at in the dust. (Oh, it was without prejudice to me!) Afterward I went past what you had passed Before we met and you what I had passed.