The Sadness That Resides in Everything

You see it in the carriage of the woman
once a man, in her careful

navigation of cobble, hands jammed
in the pockets of her leather jacket; it trails

like a scarf, lingers in the shadow
that slides along the church wall, hovers

around her booted ankles in a swirl
of trash and dusty leaves. It makes you

want an accordion player to follow
behind her in perpetual serenade, though

that too would be devastatingly sad—
the old musician stumbling finally

to bed, the accordion left in the hall
to fart itself into restless silence.

And you can spot it in the young man
allowing life to stream around him:

it’s carried in his shoulders,
which hang on a broken coat hanger,

and caught in hands that mime
knotting a rope from a boat decades

shipwrecked. It’s there in the dusty
old dog napping on its side

in a depression of sun, and in
the young girl’s hard pull

against mother’s restraining hand.
In storefront signs, handbills

blowing down the street; in the clouds
huddling above your head. And

there in your chest, hard
as a plum pit, cracked and brittle;

and in your eyes squinting
into the day’s last sun; in the fleeting

look that no one cares to read, reflected
in the window of the kite shop

closed for the season.