About Friends

The good thing about friends


is not having to finish sentences.


I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once

on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud

and watching the small chunks slide into the water

and listening to them - plop plop plop.

He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...

like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...'

We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed

and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon.


I first thought there was a sad thing about friends

when we met twenty years later.

We both talked hundreds of sentences,

taking care to finish all we said,

and explain it all very carefully,

as if we'd been discovered in places

we should not be, and were somehow ashamed.


I understood then what the river meant by flowing.