word,
consuming itself, still, and consuming, still being rage, war, the fear, the aghast,
but bless, bless still, even the fear, the loss, the gutting of word, the gutting even of hunger,
but still to bless and bless, even the turn back, the refusal, to bless and to bless and to bless.
7.
The first language was loss, the second sorrow, this is the last, then: yours …
An island, summer, late dusk; hills, laurel and thorn. I walked from the harbor, over the cliff road,
down the long trail through the rocks. When I came to our house the ship’s wake was just edging onto the shore
and on the stone beach, under the cypress, the low waves reassuming themselves in the darkness, I waited.
There was a light in a room. You came to it, leaned to it, reaching, touching,
and watching you, I saw you give back to the light a light more than light
and to the silence you gave more than silence, and, in the silence, I heard it.
You, your self, your life, your beginning, pleasure, song clear as the light that touched you.
Your will, your given and taken; grief, recklessness, need or desire.
Your passion or tear, step forward or step back into the inevitable veil.
Yours and yours and yours, the dream, the wall of the self that won’t be or needn’t be breached,
and the breach, the touch, yours and the otherness, yours, the separateness,
never giving way, never breached really, but as simple, always, as light, as silence.
This is the language of that, that light and that silence, the silence rising through or from you.
Nothing to bless or not bless now, nothing to thank or forgive, not to triumph,
surrender, mean, reveal, assume or exhaust. Our faces bent to the light, and still,
there is terror, still history, power, grief and remorse, always, always the self and the other
and the endless tide, the waver, the terror again, between and beneath, but you, now,
your touch, your light, the otherness yours, the reach, the wheel, the waves touching.
And to, not wait, not overcome, not even forget or forgive the dream of the moment, the unattainable moment again.
Your light … Your silence …
In the silence, without listening, I heard it, and without words, without language or breath, I answered.
TAR
[1983]
From My Window
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded — I hadn’t noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.
Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.
A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine,
and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the block
and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me,
their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.
I know where they’re going — to the “Legion”: once, when I was putting something out, they stopped,
both drunk that time, too, both reeking — it wasn’t ten o’clock — and we chatted for a bit.
I don’t know how they stay alive — on benefits most likely. I wonder if they’re lovers?
They don’t look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along,
contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters,
tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat,
his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down,
to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.
In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the
consuming itself, still, and consuming, still being rage, war, the fear, the aghast,
but bless, bless still, even the fear, the loss, the gutting of word, the gutting even of hunger,
but still to bless and bless, even the turn back, the refusal, to bless and to bless and to bless.
7.
The first language was loss, the second sorrow, this is the last, then: yours …
An island, summer, late dusk; hills, laurel and thorn. I walked from the harbor, over the cliff road,
down the long trail through the rocks. When I came to our house the ship’s wake was just edging onto the shore
and on the stone beach, under the cypress, the low waves reassuming themselves in the darkness, I waited.
There was a light in a room. You came to it, leaned to it, reaching, touching,
and watching you, I saw you give back to the light a light more than light
and to the silence you gave more than silence, and, in the silence, I heard it.
You, your self, your life, your beginning, pleasure, song clear as the light that touched you.
Your will, your given and taken; grief, recklessness, need or desire.
Your passion or tear, step forward or step back into the inevitable veil.
Yours and yours and yours, the dream, the wall of the self that won’t be or needn’t be breached,
and the breach, the touch, yours and the otherness, yours, the separateness,
never giving way, never breached really, but as simple, always, as light, as silence.
This is the language of that, that light and that silence, the silence rising through or from you.
Nothing to bless or not bless now, nothing to thank or forgive, not to triumph,
surrender, mean, reveal, assume or exhaust. Our faces bent to the light, and still,
there is terror, still history, power, grief and remorse, always, always the self and the other
and the endless tide, the waver, the terror again, between and beneath, but you, now,
your touch, your light, the otherness yours, the reach, the wheel, the waves touching.
And to, not wait, not overcome, not even forget or forgive the dream of the moment, the unattainable moment again.
Your light … Your silence …
In the silence, without listening, I heard it, and without words, without language or breath, I answered.
TAR
[1983]
From My Window
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded — I hadn’t noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.
Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.
A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine,
and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the block
and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me,
their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.
I know where they’re going — to the “Legion”: once, when I was putting something out, they stopped,
both drunk that time, too, both reeking — it wasn’t ten o’clock — and we chatted for a bit.
I don’t know how they stay alive — on benefits most likely. I wonder if they’re lovers?
They don’t look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along,
contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters,
tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat,
his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down,
to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.
In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the
Similar Books
