115) Untitled

You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who didn’t take the old white horse
Took the morning train.

When you go down into the city of the dead
With its whitewashed walls and winding alleys
And avenues of autumnal lindens and the heavy bells
Tolling by the sea, crowds
Appear from all directions,
Having left their benches and tiered plazas,
Laying aside their occupations of reverie
And gossip and the memory of breathing—
At least in the most reliable stories,
Which are the ones the poets tell—
To hear what scraps you can bring
Of the news of this world where the air
Is thin in the high altitudes and
Of an almost perfect density in the valleys
And shadows on summer afternoons sometimes
Achieve a shade of violet that almost never
Falls across pavements down there. Only the arborist
In the park never comes for new arrivals. He is not incurious
But he loves his work, pruning the trees,
Giving them their graceful lift
Toward light, and standing back
To study their shapes, because it is he
Who gets to decide
Which limbs get lopped off
In the kingdom of the dead.

You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who don’t take the old white horse
Take the evening train.

---Robert Haas