I Could Only Stand By

You could go for hours, months, and days
In that half-hearted, pinched kind of way
And you don’t get too often to the bruise-coloured lake
To stand, hands in your pockets
Sometimes you don’t see nothing much there:
Sunken old moorings, rusted-out stairs, and white sailboats against the sky
Not really knowing what you came there to find
Not the building’s concrete spines
Not the bitterness you always can divine
And pull from your heart like so much twine
Ravelling, unravelling, ravelling fine
You got pretty lost there in your own mind
Pathways to hallways to doorways blind
All through the winter I could only stand by
Watching you wake to the hardest kind of trouble
With no guiding line
I stood beside you, thin as a kite, wincing in the wind’s cool bite
Telling me you’ll never get nothing right
Laughing as you said it, in the low sunlight –
So brief in November, and impossibly bright