Strange Light The late call and drive through empty streets The locked doors and red-stamped folders Flights on supply planes' folding seats Checkpoints with jump soldiers But today, strange light under leaden skies That seems to come from the pelted leaves themselves ... Was it ever real? Real as this is ... Hours on winding country roads Hours on household touchups The weekend fairs and tractor shows The land-use planning dustups Where once the words that you typed at noon Crossed the desks of presidents by dusk ... Are you who you were? Were they what they seemed? Now, with a heave of the fickle mob The clowns that you harried out Have retaken that town As you watch silver seaming the mountainside From afar comes the muffled thud As your work is torn down Those towers that divide the blue Scaled to our aspirations To find who will acknowledge you To find out new sensations The patterns traced out in stone and glass As intricate but clear as a new idea And then a briny air comes up the river She crossed a square of sunlit floor Her figure an apparition She'd heard the names you dropped before But still she stopped to listen And there she sits sorting index cards Still as slim as she was that afternoon ... And then her eyes meet yours, and a puzzled smile ... The end doesn't come like the final rhyme But amid one more bid to ease Some discomfort or pain And till then there is only a slow decline But you may still look out to find A strange light in the rain ...