To keep us in longing
Even grief
Without memory.
There was only the fall
And nothing before it,
Though it was our world
And it was all we knew
— Yet impossible now
To conjure;
Every model
Draws shadows.
The mirror is the darkness
Of the pond,
Not the endlessness
Reflected.
And in that mirror
Where would be the sky
Is an idol:
Fragmented, trapped, withdrawn
Under the skin of
Safety
As masks we wear
That we call other faces.
How the ripples bend
To merge them into one
And better resemble
What we want to look back:
Healed, powerful, free,
An alchemical transmutation
Of soul
Into simulacrum.
What is this tortured blood
We crave
In the chalice we can't reach?
How brazenly what is lacking
Is substituted,
The energy of destruction
For the patient spirit.
Can we let the faces — each one
An obligation that holds
A truth that's really ours — go?
Can we let them all dissolve
And turn our gaze
To what we cannot see,
What grows in the dark,
The effervescent frailty of seed
Not the tangible souvenir of bone?
