Kevin Hart

This poem was published in the Forward Book of Poetry and I found it to be rather moving.

That Life / Kevin Hart

There is a life I've barely lived at all
And, summer afternoons, I feel it brush
Against me, heading somewhere far away,

Up in the north perhaps where rain comes down
As if just thrown in vengeance for something wrong
No one remembers now, though people talk,

And in that life I stroll through open doors
And take the darkness offered every night
And am bewildered still by clocks and eyes.

It touches me, that breath, say once a year,
When rain hits thick and hard against that door,
When I have let my darkness have its way,

And then I almost know that other world,
And live in small hard words from years ago
And cannot be at peace in any life