Departure

He leaned against the corner of the building,
the street deserted except for the body
of the wind filling in the stillness, just like
the way he moved his hands, not thinking.

But when one disturbed a spider and it
withdrew on filament into the sky, was
tugged around the corner by the gray clouds,
he thought then of the Chinese poets
by their streams, watching peach blossoms
and poems move away from them
through bars of sunlight, practicing departure.

Then the wind blew his hair into spines
and cut at his face as though it were stone.
He tried to hunch into the eddy of his own body,
to think again of the blossoms and the poems.
But they would not come back and all that remained
was the ragged filament, wavering in the sky.