Academy of American Poets Prize, 2017

 

 

You stand awake in daylight’s frame: you pull

clothes over your body: you look at me

& with your simple fingers smooth the swaths

of Barcelona’s thoughts: heavy autumn

falls across us, braided slow into

our dawning season: bold, bright corduroy

of sunrise, thighs I touch unthinkingly

beneath the mountain leaning over us:

as close in this world we can get to another.

 

You

walked up the mountain with one man & you 

came down with another. This is always 

the way with men. This is always the way 

with mountains, with you. There is the pilgrimage 

into the clouds of unknowing: the breathlessness

of narrow air: there is the learning one

another, the intoxication of

all things early: the way she stands against

a skyline & fidgets with her hands: or when

the man reads a poem aloud but like

a secret & so silences the tram:

& how the colors run from a thousand

open windows in El Born, Las Ramblas, 

in the thousand-year-old alleys they feel

themselves into the foreign bonework of old 

friends’ hands held new in the Barrio Gotico:

balconies of wind & rooftop bunking 

underneath the blanket of the city 

lights against the cloud-clot shifting pinkish-

orange & they try to stay like that entangled 

in the airport: awkward at first as ducklings

before they wander dizzy into chairs

& lean to breathe within each other’s breath: 

two lives collapsed into a single moment. 

You’d waited for me in a Viennese evening

obligatory gorgeous, a tiny bit

miraculous, haloed in houselights & so

I set out to find you: to mingle my radical

scatters with yours. I parked my car beneath

a waterfall of leaves: I stowed my life

in a single boat & row to you across

whatever waters buoy distance between 

us: & will you meet me in the field

of Spanish olives, at the world’s soft fold,

midway between the star-strung ends of our

black-water globe, that together we might 

build a cathedral of breath, & when I come

I come to worship not you but inside you:

stained glass at night lit from within: a house

of images.

 

He says the mountain is

the universal symbol for that than which

nothing greater can be conceived. She says

this is a hazy truth or else a shining

lie. In its exposure to, he says,

the elemental, the mountain lends itself

to the monastic. Which is to say: to climb 

a mountain is to renounce the world so as 

to engage it more purely: & with a human body. 

He tries too hard, she thinks. Wasn’t held enough 

as a child. She grows tired of this, loves him madly. 

 

We met one morning in Troy, & we knew the ships

‘d been loosed: three years ago almost to this

moment I write from nowhere particularly

important to lovely you somewhere in the water

hemisphere where you’re threading your novel

in my windy tomorrow & I sit here drinking

coffee in your past: & the secret, I think, 

to killing this distance is collapse. Dante

implies we’re already up, well, somewhere, here. 

& sure it gets worse for a while, but I think the point’s 

that love’s not entombed in time, or needn’t be,

if we can learn to live like poets. Not

that hell’s nothing, or else the kind of thing

you could walk around instead of through, 

it’s just that when you name the past you kill 

it, sure, but you also for a moment

let it rise & take to flame within

the lucid present. Let’s build a secret chapel 

only you and I will know the door to,

& the password is this poem plus

every other poem, & that the threshold

is the chapel is the secret we will 

keep beneath a love in fathoms of feelings 

& seasons: we’ll sweep away mundane debris 

beneath the monastery ceiling where

at times we’ll weep our eyes wide, terrified

to life, leaning into one another 

mid the din of passing strangers. Will we 

be shy when we come down? Will we forget

the earthquake-hold it had on us when first 

we felt the blast, or else apologize

to the cracked-wide sky when the downpour drops chaos

on us? That we made it watch us fuck while the wind 

picked up & the walls fell apart in our fingers? Gaudi’s

stations of the cross toward Montserrat:

carved into rocks; fourteen stops; a sonnet 

without a turn. Numbers are the language

of death, & there is truth in repetition,

the opposite of recollection: wipes clean 

the film that preserves and thereby distances 

the past. But this: the gospel truth: to see 

the crucifixion in yourself & not

turn back: to walk to the ledge & out past it

up here, where your hair moves indefinitely, 

& where I’ll be as long as you will bleed

your paper heart & let me read it to 

the trees however far they sway beneath 

us: to see it all in conflagration

& move in the direction of what makes

the burning brightest. 

 

Words, at best, tie strings

to kites & hope for frequency: that tension 

might acquire a key & sing to what 

the wind might mean to, say, lovers hovered 

helplessly at mountain heights: two friends who

shared a city once & didn’t know it:

who stood possibly (though this part is un-

likely) in the same public library 

& maybe, he says, you were standing one day

on one side of the shelf while I was on

the other, & maybe, she says, to humor him,

something passed between us & we’ve travelled

all these years to pass it back. Yes, he says, 

& all the lights flickered. Okay, she says, 

the lights flicker, & they do, in a way: 

everything’s the same: utterly changed. 

We had no city so we built one from 

a stack of letters, Brahms played slow over

a patchwork of blue hours, the sky a bit of sleet

so when we wake the world’s englazed & held

undriven, dead-beautiful, transparent:

everything we see just as it had been

only glowing. City built from all we

had & wanted & our having wanted

it. From the patient eyes required to gaze down

a horizon in the City of Take-

Your-Time-but-When-You’re-Ready-Come-to-Me.

Still I thought we would be more together than this. 

We hurt one another: we buck love’s weight. 

We sulk & feel sorry, creatures of weather.

Meanwhile our love tumbles in the wind

across a beach somewhere: the answer to

questions we never know the words to ask.

Let’s be kind to one another. Truth moves

toward what is open, only slowly, just

as waters carry mountains out to sea

through the city we build & wake up to

together: Our City of Mystic Collapse,

where space & time are broken open &

it all begins to bleed together: where

your hand becomes my hand: my lips are yours:

Barcelona becomes Wellington,

Columbia: the blur of then & now

& here we are, & there is time enough

for us to learn to raise ourselves anew 

each day in the past-stained light & find our lives

transfigured in the sometimes-boring hurtle 

toward our something like an ever after.