The sun has not tumbled from the sky
into Eggemoggin Reach, boiling the water
down to its salt, melting the granite islands
to black unrecognizable blobs, which they
would be already if it weren’t for those trees;
The leaves on those trees have not yet
tumbled from their branches. Well, they wouldn’t,
anyway, those trees being evergreens, right? Still,
if they did — and they would be needles then,
not leaves — it would be worse, because
those trees wouldn’t be dormant for winter,
they’d be dead.
I am not dead, and neither, I hope, are you,
mainly because when I was driving
behind you on the Deer Isle Bridge — you
were going intolerably slow, perhaps
because you were admiring the view
from a roadbed which aims at a near-vertical
into the sky, or because you were terrified
of heights and had your eyes closed,
gripping the wheel until your knuckles whitened —
I smiled grimly and did not rear-end you,
did not send us both tumbling toward miserable death.
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