Song After Sadness

Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are 
that which must be made 
servant only to salt, only 
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into 
the exhibit of birches 
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels 
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling, 
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don't say it's the beautiful 
I praise. I praise the human, 
gutted and rising.

Koi

After all the days and nights we've spent 
with Starry Messenger, with Dante, 
with Plato, his temperance
painted as a woman who pours 
water into a bowl but does not spill, 
after particle theory and the geologic time of this quartz 
gilded beneath the roaming gone, 
composites of limestone calculated down to the animal
that laid upon it and quietly died, 

after hearing how camels carted away the broken 
Colossus of Rhodes, showing us how to carry 
and build back our destroyed selves,

hearing there was once a hand 
that first learned to turn 
an infant right in the womb, 

that there was, inside Michelangelo, an Isaiah to carve out 
the David, the idea, the one buried 
in us who can slay the enormities, 

after all visions and prophecies that made the heart large, 
once and again, true or untrue, 

after learning to shave the gleaming steel down—
the weapon, the bomb we make, 
and the watercolor made after 
of the dropped-upon crowd, thin strokes 
over a pale wash—
                            after all this, still 
one of us can’t know another.  
	
Once under an iron sky I listened 
to a small assemblage of voices. 
Two by two broke off into the field 
to strip down the unbroken flock of starling dark 
between them. The ceremony of the closing in,
the hope each to each might not stay tourists
before the separate, chiseled ruin of the other: 

The unspeakable, illegible one before us—

this is what the linguists call the dead, isn't it? 

But how are you, we say, 
meaning how have you been made,  
what is wrong, what 
happened, we ask, how long have you been waiting, 
are you on my side, can you promise to stay, 
will you keep 
the etchings clear on my stone 
and come visit me, your never-known,  
			                     
                                                           will you lean over my ghost 
how we leaned over the green pools of the Japanese garden,
a cluster of lanterns blowing out above us
wisp by wisp, a school of koi pausing at the surface, 
letting us look all the way in
until we saw each eye 
                                 was like a net heaped on shore.

Just like our eyes, weren’t they? all accidents, wastes, 
all saving needs filled and unfilled, the cracked shells, 
the kelp fronds torn from their buoys, all caught here, 
inside us—
               the seven we loved, the six we lost— 
seaglass the living
and the human, alone.

Breaking Across Us Now

I began to see things in parts again,
segments, a pen drawn against the skin
to show where to cut, lamppost through the stained glass
with its etchings of light against the wall —
it was the middle of the night. It was something we would tell no one:
The hospital roads with standing water, I drove quickly through,
saying, you won’t have to stay.
                                                 But then I left without you,
you whom I’ve felt missing all this time —
when I sat in the weeds of the yard, told to pull them
from the root, not to touch the wild trillium, tying knots in the daffodil stalks,
discontented. When I watched the scatters
of firs sway their birds out through my storm windows,
the tree itself now and no more,
I thought I needed belief — walking through the stubbed wheat grass
requesting everything that would undo me — the nearness of Christ,
abandon and devotion — no one has to teach me
my disobediences. No one sees
the shed I see now, its roof bent with snow, all of it
leaning south how it was never built.
The inches overcome it, but
the green wood darkens, oceanic and deep.
                                                                   He might not wake up,
I thought that night —
                                         I remembered the house I boarded in one summer
with a widower, his wife’s fabric samples left draped over
the arm of the unfinished chair. I could feel her eyes
in my own when I tried to choose
between them, almost, if the sun of the alcove
hadn’t faded them, the dust and his arms worn them.
The sky as stark as the first sheet laid down
after they took her body.
                                           But on that night
while I waited, the clouds casketed the stars,
stars with no chambers or hollows, filling themselves
with their own heat how a hive quivers
to fill each crevice with itself,
how I have never been able.

[I Failed Him and He Failed Me]

I failed him and he failed me—
Together our skinned glance makes a sorry bridge 
For some frail specter who can't get through.

I failed him 
               but maybe it was the lamp that failed,
Maybe it was the meal,
Maybe it was the potter 
Who would not intervene, maybe the clay, 
Maybe the plateau's topaz, too steady to help, 
Or was it the meat cut two days late, was it 
The deciduous branch and its dull wait for bloom—

But I remember the small thing rotating in us 
Towards hunger, how it did not fail to guide, 
And that we made no request of our souls or all souls 
Or the one perfectly distant soul 
                                         and so did not fail in what we did not do, 
Never begging at the sky but moving 
On the islands beneath it, hungry together by its rivers and bones. 

Who told us we had failed
If not the human world gone wrong? 

It was the world?

Ah, then we will fail again and again in the waters apart,
Bridging nothing, bridging nowhere 
Towards what we, failures, are.

Related Poems

Another Song [Are they shadows that we see?]

    Are they shadows that we see?
    And can shadows pleasure give?
    Pleasures only shadows be
    Cast by bodies we conceive,
    And are made the things we deem,
    In those figures which they seem.
But these pleasures vanish fast,
Which by shadows are exprest:
    Pleasures are not, if they last, 
    In their passing, is their best.
    Glory is most bright and gay
    In a flash, and so away.
Feed apace then greedy eyes
On the wonder you behold.
    Take it sudden as it flies
    Though you yake it not to hold:
    When your eyes have done their part,
    Thought must length it in the heart.