You mysterious cruel hand,
you cold dropped and not-yet-dropped rain,
you broken line of lost ducklings. Look
what you did to the artists, the lovers
who wanted to walk the Great Wall
of China from opposite ends, to meet
and marry, sending so many unmanageable
turns that something unmendable
was twisted between them, pushing them
on till they revised the agreement, promised
not to meet to marry but to meet to separate,
for you are a harsh teacher. The morning after
I sent the last letter I would write
as a husband, I trod a path of prickly leaves
through trees like long brown fingers
of cracked bark, poking the blue belly sky
where the sun kept breaking light
through the glistening gaps of the bare branches
that sent the boy in me one way,
the man the other.
