Membership Drive

I am the spokesman for the Society of Individuals.

We have no members.

Please do not join us.

Cache

There are still things I won’t move
Because he put them where they are.

It’s been three years.  He isn’t coming back.
But a small backpack still waits for him
In a half-neglected closet,
With gloves and goggles in it,
In case he rises from the dead
With a sudden urge to go cross-country skiing –
Which, to be fair, does sound a bit like him.
 
But honestly, it’s hard to see him caring
What happened to his stuff, if he came back.
He’d want to hold us very tightly, and
Find out what we’ve been up to, and we’d want
To know if he’d seen God or the end of the universe,
And he’d have interesting things to say about all that.
Eventually, sure, he’d get around to skiing,
But we could always buy him new goggles and gloves;
We’d make a whole excursion of it, happy just
To spend time in his presence, doing anything.
 
He won’t come back, though.  We can wait and wait,
Along with that small backpack, all we like;
We’ll just keep growing older, and someday,
Someone will move the backpack, and one more
Quiet evidence that he ever existed
Will then be gone forever, like he is.

Encounter

 

Once I met a human being.

It was a man or a woman, as I recall.

It was black or white or possibly Chinese,

Or Indian or the other kind of Indian,

And it had an age and a color of hair.

But mostly, it was just a human being,

As full of doubt and courage as myself,

And when it spoke it was not age or gender,

Nor hair-color, faith, or citizenship that spoke;

It was, instead, the human being speaking,

In the words it could find at that particular moment,

And I listened with all the attention and empathy

That I could muster up at that particular time.

We parted, then, and I went back to my

Momentary and eternal concerns,

And so did he or she, and we mostly forgot,

But never forgot completely, the words that we had said

As one human being talking with another –

Wearing our skins, but speaking from inside.