Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.

a walk in a midwinter ochre wood
to get some england sun
as it steals away—
a little poodle runs to show you love;
you like the feel of the animal’s body
on your leg; it’s something
of an acceptance so you smile
and are not the least bothered; you even hope
it’ll jump, though the lady yells
no jumping Sam! no jumping!
and when she adds ‘you know he
just loves EVERYbody!’ why should you
suddenly feel tears coming?—
it’s just that EVERYbody; how do you
explain this? there’s nobody to explain
it to: why she needed to take away
from you this one feeling of special?
how could she know it was the most
human moment of your day—
the most human moment in weeks?

^{(To F. S.)}

I loved my friend. 
He went away from me. 
There’s nothing more to say. 
The poem ends, 
Soft as it began,—
I loved my friend. 

14.

Old baseball glove,
toy of the blind kid.
Who sniffed its oiled leather,
who could not use it.
Sometimes he’d cry into it.

Do you understand that dark joy?

15.

In the monastery at Velamo
I took a sauna with a monk
Who was one hundred years old
In the steam his skin smelled
like strawberries.
“What do you like to eat?” I asked.
“Strawberries,” he said.

16.

He spends his life
Believing there’s another
Standing on his own shoulders
Looking out to sea.

17.

I love the horse at Lascaux
So unsecured and fast
Legs vanishing
Even as we look
No one to tame her
Only the river’s light

18.

Write poems in the mornings
Pour out yesterday’s tea
Think of Helen Keller
Who dove into life as
A cormorant hits the sea
The speed of that dive
Me? I entered this world
Already lost, having come
From Mithraic light
Whose sun falls across these pages

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.

Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.

Though the people on the internet help too. 
They send money by pressing a small button 
on their screens. It would be disingenuous 
to claim all the credit—we can’t heal

or hurt alone. I sniff the tops of the rose heads 
like a newborn’s scalp—fresh skin and hair
only a few days picked. I try to arrange the flowers
on my bed, create a romantic scene 

like all the 90s rom-coms I still watch. I’m stuck
in the past, I know. I’m stuck in the present, 
I know that too. I thought the roses 
could be a cure, and maybe in a small way

they were, each petal I plucked so gently 
from the stems gave in to me. 

^{Jules Bastien-Lepage, Poor Fauvette, 1881}

Late winter, and the little girl stares off, her gaze
reaching down into your soul. She’s wrapped
herself in a makeshift shawl of brown cloth
to ward off the cold this very morning, as she stands
there in some wintry field out in Damvillers,
minding the family cow as it feeds on straw and thistle.

“There are some glorious pictures,” D.H. Lawrence
wrote a friend, after viewing the canvas at a winter
exhibition some thirty years after Bastien-Lepage
painted the scene, the artist himself long since gone.
But nothing caught his eye like this scene, as he watched
the lovely woman in her smart, dark velvet suit

and hat, its feathers flowing down over her shoulders,
a woman so unlike that poor Fauvette. “Too sad,”
the woman whispered, as she confided to the man
beside her there. “But then that is what the country
does to one.” And now, the moment over, the two
moved on to yet another landscape, and then another.

And here’s the thing: it’s the gaze of that little girl,
isn’t it, that embeds itself upon your heart, before you too
find yourself likewise turn away. How many times
have you been stopped when you least expected
by someone asking you to look at them and listen?
Like the daughter of an old friend, himself long gone,

catching you in the frozen parking lot of the old brick
church just after Mass this morning, when all you
wanted was to climb inside your car for warmth,
her face and yours masked by this pandemic,
though her teary eyes spoke volumes as she began
to speak of the deep rifts between her brother and herself.

And what was there for you to do but listen in that
freezing morning. Pain is pain. Pain is personal. Still,
you’ve learned to listen, which somehow seems to help.
To help the other, as it helps your sorry self just to know
you care. Something that seems to repeat itself more
and more now, giving back something of yourself.

Like that bread just offered you, which you consumed
before you left the parking lot to head back home for
coffee, eggs and toast. Which is more than what poor
Fauvette will feast on when she returns this evening
back home, cold and weary, to sup on her daily bread,
if that, both those gazes etched now on your heart.

I stand at the kitchen sink, washing wineglasses.
In the fifth century BCE, Heraclitus wrote that the way up

is the way down. Like my five empty bottles of merlot in recycle
and the depression I’d fallen into before quitting my job—

clinical director of the county emergency shelter—
which meant talking to children after their father lit them on fire,

the foster parents forcing them to eat from a dog bowl on the floor
while the biological kids ate at the dinner table.

The saints were all about suffering: scourges, crucifixion, drownings.
Nothing but death led a saint to give up on intercession.

As for me, I’d seen my last four-point restraint of a preteen with HIV,
last feral kid armed with a blade extracted from the pencil sharpener.

Now I look out the kitchen window, remembering this one kid,
her hair a dark forest of perfectly matched firs, her black eyes.

In Catholicism, only an exercise of infallible magisterium makes a saint.
Or to paraphrase Heraclitus, the pope decides if a saint’s way down

is the way up. For ten years, that girl was returned to us after every failed
placement, with a new tattoo or piercing for every john she’d tricked,

only to hang herself on her eighteenth birthday.
It was March, vernal equinox, first day of spring. Emancipated Minor,

they called her at Social Services, meaning no money, nowhere to go.
Did I already say she was extraordinarily beautiful?

Before her, I thought beauty was easy to see. Something the spirit feasted on,
while the saints starved themselves on behalf of the afflicted.

Now I set the wineglasses on a clean towel to dry.
Stare at the plum tree that secretly erupted into blossom overnight.

I still can’t tell you the girl’s name, but I’m whispering it to myself.
She taught me something true about beauty.

It is not just those impossibly perfect stars of petals detonated all at once.
It’s how you see the rain-dark branches when the white lace is gone.

’T is but a score of hours when he didst swear
My sorrow and my joy to share.
    Despite the fates, fore’er ;
But now he’s gone to cash again his lie ;
    Others his shame with me will wear,
                  Why should I die?

Last night his lips my very feet didst burn ;
His kisses dropt, my love to earn,
    Whichever way he’d turn ;
But now he’s gone another soul to rob,
    Another heart to lure and spurn,
                   Why should I sob?

He did not kiss me when he said good-bye ;
I let him go, not asking why,
    Nor do I for him sigh ;
He’s gone another virgin breast to tear.
    He’s gone on other lips to die,
                    Why should I care?