So it is with the frantic vanishing of things.
Late into the escapade you wondered why you felt this
Way and how. The trees and the deer outside were
Not listening. Dispelled myths and abjured dreams.
Constantly creating what you cannot understand.
Constantly motioning for signs of change.
You were walking backwards into the strength
Of somebody else’s poem, all while you were not looking.
The trees were the color of the houses, the houses
The color of the planets. Somebody was listening but you
Did not know who. The withdraw of first things meant the
Inrush of…
It was only in the frenzy of an unheard of
Night that I heard you singing the end of God’s life.
In the private language of hopelessness, all of us were
Equally blind, all of us possessive of the same lack
Of knowing. So I culled you, pulled you close.
How, I, in taking you apart diminished myself was beyond me.
And yet tamed and merciful I sit here listening. Situation
After situation unfolds without choice. The drugged forests
Have been cut down, the trees dismembered, and we peopled
The raw fields with our own image.
Pieces of the hereafter drifted into view. You cut them up
Further, scattered them despairingly across the way. We
Felt there was no further answer — unable or unwilling to see.
The constellations looked like a storm and I was no closer
To them than I was when we began.
You were secretly enamored
With the split backbone of the sex and
Centuries and the love hereafter of feeling alive.
She brushed the clouds and the earth stopped its tumult.
I climbed a ladder to nowhere. And somehow,
Sorrow was not the experience of falling away. I knew what
You…
Now there is never something that
You can never quite articulate that speaks
Up and down the ladder of vowels and vows
And moves you to assimilate yourself into
The scheme of personal survival. Dreams have
A spongey, almost benign quality. The New
Testament grammars are just as dark as…
Half of what I said was metaphor.
Quietness, the gift.
The heart asleep.
I drew a circle here: eyeless and strange.
I strapped you in. The moths
Around the house have been hovering —
And we were fearless enough to stay.
God wills us forward, but we are not moving.
Winter without winter. A Baroque feeling
Of things, permeating the half-lost field of
Vision and observation. In this, there is
Death and life, but you have to choose. Your vigilance
Is warranted, but your reticence is not. Now —
