"At my age . . . what is there left to

 confront but the great simplicities?"

       -  Stanley Kunitz

I don't know exactly where it was, or when,

But live long enough and we, mostly without

Even knowing it, cross over the line between

Measuring out the passage of our brief days

Not by what is gained but by what is lost, 

As now, rain falling harder and wind rising,

The last of hydrangea planted by my neighbor,

Dead now two months, shudders and slumps,

Surrendering its shattered lavender body

To the slope and slip of ground where rain

Laps over the leaf-filled gutter and one by one

Petals lift and drift away on the runoff, how

In every flourishing are seeds of abandonment,

His house now empty within and without,

He in his leaving now well and truly gone.