Strum of an Old Song

Self-doubt resolves
To doubt of God 
In the golden turning 
— These decades, for example,
Wasted trying
To wrestle truth
From a stubborn crevasse
— How the window opened to dust
And the greyness of the living
Permeated the ancient 
Ruins of city.

What couldn’t be contained
Finally is 
In the wreck that was salvaged
To be thrown away
Someday,
Wistful gifts
Of consoling
We thought would echo
Through the years
With our ambitions —
Instead are nested 
In reliquarial chlorophyll 
Like border guards
In glass cases
On the waiting roads.

How cleverly they never resolve
And never seem to get their point
Of holding space in an impossible
Tightness of spirit,
What living did to us
And what the voices tried to
Save us from,
As angels often do,
Sending aperçus for us to waste,
Thinking that better than
Their being consumed,
And better than being caught
In it, the dark moment,
For we thought we could become
Some star, however dim,
However theoretical
To shine from a distance —

So that it might be said, in the end,
We never lived — except in this,

The refraction, as if it could subsist
Outside of us, like it was something
We could escape from
Ourselves in.