Waiting For A Ride

Standing at the baggage, passing time:

Austin, Texas, airport–my ride hasn’t come yet.

My former wife is making Web sites from her home,

one son’s seldom seen,

the other and his wife have a boy and girl of their own.

My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town

so she can get to high school.

My mother, ninety-six, still lives alone and she’s in town, too,

always gets her sanity back just barely in time.

My former former wife has become a unique poet;

most of my work,

such as it is, is done.

Full moon was October 2nd this year,

I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck,

white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine,

owl hoots and rattling antlers,

Castor and Pollux rising strong–

it’s good to know that the polestar drifts!

That even our present night sky slips away;

not that I’ll see it.

Or maybe I will, much later,

some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,

that long walk of spirits–where you fall right back into the

“narrow painful passageway of the Bardo”

squeeze your little skull

and there you are again

waiting for your ride

–Gary Snyder