WARD KELLEY
Eternity in Life, the Undeposed

from histories of souls

You once said love
is a Widening,
and so it must be,
for one can see it
even here, centuries
after centuries after you . . .

Love comes gripping
and groaning
to spread our faces
into something like souls;
it places us in time
neither past nor coming,
and opens us to the suggestion
of circumference.

You knew we all swallow
wide this brown river,
these waters in which
all souls swim forever,
whether we are aware
of the widening or whether
we see only the flesh
of this particular moment.

You are swimming
far, far ahead of us,
the sunny soles of your feet
gaily splashing in our
peripheral vision.