I don’t know whether to grieve or to celebrate –
Such are the anomalies of the products of time –
The weighing of loss and gain on an imaginary scale –
Like that shopping cart with all that matters inside –
There’s a kind of intelligence, too large for this moment
–
Our fractured experience shining from mirrors
As if it will stay forever unfinished.
Such godly light on weeds and broken lamps –
The foam beds laid next to the tumbleweeds –
It fills the commuters with desire
To make of themselves something real –
Despite the silence of the nascent berries –
Because our gifts are down the road we tarry here
At the tents beside the riverbed –
Where the offerings of sun fell back to earth
To sweep around what’s broken like a dance
– So hard, it seems, this learning – without a prod
Or rod or forehead star from the masters high above –
Except what happens here, beside this living stream
That flashes back the thing we only see –
Light and leaf who will not be told apart –
A grace that’s unattainable to all but the will –
Whose garish letters bend in paint here
Like cities lining up their magic for release –
As if to say “Beauty is, again, too ubiquitous” –
That shade of almost pink along the rock path –
The wrinkles in the river under the bridge –
The branches that grow out from the stone –
These, somehow, can’t be heard except as music,
A distant tune so elusive it makes us uncomfortable –
Reminds us that we do not exist
Except in what we feel.
The faces are what pull me back –
So many lifetimes unresolved with every one of them
–
Where can the sun go at night in the face of such lilac?
The electric light holds, but not to resolve
But because no one will turn it off –
No one comes out
To prove they are who they say they are –
Although that is what is always on their minds –
The sunset shatters across the sky –
As if what’s kept from us can't be shared –
We would not know how to walk in that light
In the face of so many shadows –
The road is open for the one –
But that is what is missing
In the scurry of the whistling leaves –
And as the darkness falls the other is ours
As if the first of the moon has given its permission
To chase down the light as if a ghost
And the ghost as if a light –
It’s a dance that consummates in sleep
And further, ever distant and more hopeful dreams:
More places to escape, people to solve,
Floods of hinted memories
To forget immediately …
Until the light begins to seem again as if it could be a
friend –
As the first of the morning trucks moves in
To rouse the people in the bushes –
As if there was ever anything more than a hope –
The staring at you from a distant view –
To be understood in lieu of understanding yourself –
The act of knowing what you aren’t is a kind of wisdom –
If it is of them, in the end, not of you, it is something
–
Faces – the endless poignancy you lack – can become one’s
familiar,
The ever-expanding stick to reach out for
That takes you as far as you want it to go –
Though it was never really there at all.
