Pain Is the Beam that Penetrates,

Comes brazen, even in daylight, ordained by the gods
Holds infinite motes in suspension, appears citrine
Enters sometimes obliquely, outwits the amulet, the chant
Leaves a hot-to-touch scar, initiates a tenderness of decades
Says you are gone
Causes drought, chronic longing, the unwitting
             all-night vigil, tears on linoleum, the shut door
Manifests as pestilent thorns if overindulged or ignored
Transforms if acknowledged, gazed
           lightly upon, if made recipient of secret letters
Granulates in a climate of continuous acceptance
Reduces to lambent dust, self-luminous
Bestows a capacity for seeing, breaches
              the retina, darkens the limbal ring of the eye
Does not ever really leave, but suffuses the system
Hums in spring in the skull on the lap of the Magdalene
Links to the global network through which compassion passes
           as juice passes through my hands now folded on the tablecloth
           and into the hard green beginnings of our orchard’s plums
Repeats you are gone
Looks, under a microscope, like sugar many times refined
Heats the bulbs, the clenched peonies, the bunched-up
clumps of leaves to a point of capitulation
Opens glossy folios, ultraviolet, in the mind.