Eric Paul Shaffer - Exactly

'Do you know how much you need? '
asked Keoki at the hardware store,
but suddenly, it was no longer about rope

for hanging clothes under tropical sun
because his question brought back that day.

'Hey, ' he said, but I was off and thinking,
already five times zones east
and thirty years from where now I stand:

I'm gazing at a gravestone I glimpsed once
walking in a Vermont cemetery with my dog-

a flat slab of cut gray marble set in the grass,
just a name, two dates, a life
the length of a hyphen, and a single word:

'Enough.'

Eric Paul Shaffer

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/exactly/