The heft of a palm-sized pebble
is all it takes to get in touch
with what we left behind or lost,
fingering the texture, testing
the age-old fact of gravity,
wondering how far we could
toss it in a time when that
would matter, the target
a tree twenty yards away.
If you missed, you’d simply
pick up another pebble
and try again, sighting
the imaginary bullseye
concealed in a stump
before continuing on,
kicking up a small puff
of dust on the trail in one more
foreshortened summer before
the world as we knew it then
was beginning to end.
