I Could Only Stand By

You could go for hours, months, and days

In that half-hearted, pinched kind of way

And you don’t get too often to the bruise-coloured lake

To stand, hands in your pockets

Sometimes you don’t see nothing much there:

Sunken old moorings, rusted-out stairs, and white sailboats against the sky

Not really knowing what you came there to find

Not the building’s concrete spines

Not the bitterness you always can divine

And pull from your heart like so much twine

Ravelling, unravelling, ravelling fine

You got pretty lost there in your own mind

Pathways to hallways to doorways blind

All through the winter I could only stand by

Watching you wake to the hardest kind of trouble

With no guiding line

I stood beside you, thin as a kite, wincing in the wind’s cool bite

Telling me you’ll never get nothing right

Laughing as you said it, in the low sunlight –

So brief in November, and impossibly bright