The Happy Friend

How the happy friend became
a study in rigidity whose eyes
I closed quite carefully, I'll never know.
The long day's last surprise
meant nothing was the same.
Outside, snow turned to rain and back to snow.

The window framed a night
of soundless traffic passing in the street,
bare trees grew from the pooled light into dark.
The friend's life was complete.
Having no proper rite,
I rose and looked out on an edge of park,

slowly becoming me,
my vigil ended in a simple room.
Who was that husk inhabiting the bed,
the part left to inhume?
In speechless company,
I stepped out for a breath to clear my head.

A lamplit cloud escaped
before me as I walked without an aim.
I wondered if my friend had traveled far
now nothing was the same,
and falling snow had draped
a passing bus, a car, another car,

until the muffled street
was full of gliding ghosts. Those other lives,
anonymous to me, were everywhere
a person could arrive,
in houses, dark or lit,
in taxis cruising for another fare,

in shelters and motels,
in hospitals, on heating grates below
grid-plotted canyon walls of corporate towers.
Only a snowball's throw
from disappearing trails,
the living kept on breathing through the hours.