Synchrony

Your old friend is scattering 
the ashes of her grandson 
into the lake where he liked 
to swim before fentanyl 
and his furtive night life,

as you, speechless, consider 
Brueghel and that boy’s legs 
engulfed by the sea, all 
that’s left of his bravado, 
that precipitous fall.

You know how the sun sets 
at different times, rises 
too, without you; the tides 
churn in and out, the rains 
wash and the daylight

dries. The foot never 
steps into the same river twice. 
The book reads us a hundred 
ways, and we, it. The painting 
and its memorable response, 
“Musée des Beaux Arts,”

both frame and provoke, 
yet you find it comfortless, 
grim, but true. You want to 
offer consolation to your friend, 
but this poem or that one, you know, 
will, lamentably, never do.