The memory of childhood, of stooping
above the drain grate, dropping pebbles
one by one between the metal bars,
imagining they would never hit bottom,

reminds me that you, too, have fallen
away, tumbled between the teeth
of another sort of grate,
into a different darkness none of us

knows a thing about. So now,
the rest of us hunched around this beach
fire, spilling our stories
into the night, and you not here,

brings the wish back with the memory:
that each bright pebble might spin and fall
through all the airy dark, the water's
unbroken surface endlessly below.

                                                     First published in The Southern Review, 1995
                                                     Also in Strange Wood (Winthrop Poetry Series, 1998)