—for MLT

Both of us teetered on the edge of knowing and nothingness.
It was winter, and we’d been thinking of trees—
they’re rooted in their own shadows but they don’t die;
they just put on another life each spring then go on
with the business of coming undone again, Mick said,
confusing what he’d heard in class about the tragic hero.
As for knowing and nothingness, I’d been reading
a book on physics and couldn’t say what I wanted to say,
some things being too beautiful for words. Mick was
tragic, all right, and maybe a hero, the way he held up
under life's clean beatings that left their mark  
in songs he wrote but had no music for, lines you’d swear
the ink could never dry on, they were that raw.
The past comes into existence only when we observe it,
I read, misquoting Heisenberg. No, path, I said,
but by then Mick was gone, and only the leaves returned.