I was bundled up in layers, walking aimlessly down the road
while cold rain and hailstones fell upon my collar.
I stepped over a ditch and green duck shit, got my shoes wet,
and stopped on a wooden plank bridge that overlooked the pond
(which is not really a pond but more of a reprieve for drainage ditches).
I was watching the runoff roil in, this frigid mass of new-torn sediment
and leaves, cigarette butts and cigarette packs, foil candy wrappers
and anti-depressants and Valium metabolites and every other suburban thing
and the murky water became darker and darker as I stared.
Out near the center the pond became clearer, and impossibly
a circle of iridescent water shimmered for a moment then was broken like a mirror.
I stood there with my eyes fixed on that point and shed my tears of grief
for Philip Seymour Hoffman, an artist, taken by heroin at age forty-six.
