The Heart's Counting Knows Only One

In Sung China,

two monks, friends for sixty years

watched the geese pass.

Where are they going?

one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship

in the koan-books of insight.

No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,

standing, perplexed by sadness,

goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,

but not yet.

As the barely audible

geese are not yet swallowed;

as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

~ Jane Hirshfield
from Lives of the Heart

art by Stanley Roseman