and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of the honey locust and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes
From Chronic by D. A. Powell. Copyright © 2009 by D. A. Powell. Used by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.