Disappear

At Blackwater Pond

You know how it feels,
wanting to walk into
the rain and disappear-
wanting to feel your life
brighten and grow weightless
as a leaf in the fall.

And sometimes, for a moment,
you feel it beginning - the sense
of escape sharp as a knife-blade
hangs over the dark field
of your body, and your soul
waits just under the skin
to leap away over the water.

But the blade,
at the last minute, hesitates
and does not fall,
and the body does not open,
and you are what you are-
trapped, heavy and visible
under the rain, only your vision
delicate as old leaves skimming
over the mounds of the seasons,
the limits of everything,
the few shaped bones of time.

Page 49, 'Twelve Moons', poems by Mary Oliver