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 —
The mirror was a
Shining body of light. Children saw a million
Translucent dawns, but it didn’t matter.
Days passed out of order. You couldn’t
Put them back together.
There was no subtlety in the dismemberment:
The landscape was stripped to its skeleton. The
Trees pulled up, the stones tossed into a pond.
No one can endure like this, indefinitely. They
cannot. New longings spring up; old longings
Knock at the door. Are you see this? And if you…
