I laid myself flat before you,

Like a child, confessing my sin.

I could have made myself a stone,

The bony ridge of my spine,

A sad arc, installed forever

In your living room.

I put my failures before you.

What would love do with a blade

In its hand? You drew it lightly

At my throat, touched its tip to my heart,

then brutally, and all at once,

Cut me loose.

What of the planet, now stripped

Of its orbit? Having gained the whole expanse

Of space, and its massive loneliness,

How long does it want for the old gravity,

Despair at the lateral freefall,

Hoping, again, to be caught?

Now our dead gather; the days,

Or the nights, happy moments,

Stolen away from a brighter past.

All our hopes still stand inside of me,

Fatherless, unborn.

Winter Ridge

I walked the winter ridge

in summertime; saw the old guard

now dressed, verdant, a proud line

standing straight up to the heavens.

Their woody balm, pervading,

wafting dreamily in.

I took my sadness to the earth;

Remembered the colder days

I'd walked those same ways,

Swollen with the promise of spring,

blushing in a season of new love.

But all yesterdays had been discarded;

together, pressed underfoot,

the black of bygone, now the bed

of all tomorrow's promise.

With it, the forest grew, up and up.

August's sun gilded the river,

The sterling cliffs cutting down

to a wildflower cloud. I broke their stems

crossing to the shore, where golden waters

lapped tamely.

All these things, I knew without name;

their voices, the thronging of cellophane wings.

How I could have wept.

I stood before them, and pressed

The wound that gaped wide in my chest.

Newly drawn, its ends yet to be defined,

sorrow crowned with splendor.  

Threads.

I measured out a thread and cut it,

A neat length, stretched out from arm to arm,

The ends frayed, a stray filament

Raised itself up and away from the rest.

But it is the business

Of edges to be unraveled, unclean,

And the ordered mind does best

To let slip those last lines. 

A bell that fills with light

And warm fog, an odorless myrrh

That oscillates and turns into forms

And feelings, more real than they were

In the first moment they moved through my mind.

This is memory, the extraction

A mouthful of life’s marrow.

The experience of a mouth,

Of strangeness, the plunge of pain,

The outward surge of want,

The body of an allusory glance,

Fully fleshed.

I was made for them, to hold them

To me, like children; to rear them

And play out their imagined patterns,

To suffer with them, to feel, over and over

The shuddering instant of death.

I will hold no more promises

Up to this world, nor live in terror

Of its impermanence.