God of the Living
This only will I say about the dead:
they know about it so much more than you.
It’s already given them their secret names
to seal their lips and open wide their eyes.
Do not ask about the resurrection.
The answers I could give would just be words,
and the dead belong to something other now
whose language is a blank and endless wall.
Untitled
When I returned to my home
it was winter
and it was not my home.
Elegy: of her final lover
Sleep, sleep
in the bosom of the blackest night,
in the gentle shroud of earth
returning memory to dust,
in the cold embrace of eternity,
in the funeral of time;
forget the name of one who shared your name,
in a poison cloak of lily blossoms
in a silent box, and in your favorite dress
which you have never worn so gracefully,
so peacefully, so black as nothingness.
Your eyes are closed; this is the end.
In Veracruz you wore that dress
so long ago, so beautifully, asleep
beneath the stars surrounding Mexico
where we were joined, the Gulf the endless bed
of our betrothal.
I remember:
I held you closer than I had ever held
another, closer than anyone before
or since, but still the water found the voids
between our bodies, filled our mouths
with darkness when we kissed; it hollowed out
our hearts when we would try to speak.
The darkness was between us every time
we touched, but it is only now that I
am jealous, for the first time jealous I
cannot divorce the darkness from your form
in the bed of your blackest lover,
who holds you closer than any human arms.
Untitled
The rain was falling like perfect
like thousands of little hands.
I looked from the doorway
and my looking was part of the perfect.
Everywhere the sky was gray-green and trembling,
discipled to the spaces it informed;
my looking was formed as a thank-you;
my looking was part of the thanked.
And you passed me out into the front yard,
your hair blood-red and half-wet
and your half-turn back to smile
and your bare feet.
Sometimes I can barely
contain myself,
my skin no boundary from the sky.
My heart could almost burst
a benediction over everything:
I could step into that rain forever
and keep going out forever like
a cloud that’s just too full to hold
will break itself to bright its blessing toward
Untitled
The words will be inscribed in green or pink
and in your former lover’s hand—writing
to you when you were seventeen years old,
and to that place in you still seventeen years old,
and to that part that will forever be –
a name so deep that names will disappear,
discovered late at night in dresser drawers
in guest rooms of your mother’s house,
as if returning home to find
yourself somehow departed, gone, and gone
to sleep at dawn on couches, shaking
the quiet death-rattle in your bones.
No question and no answer where it goes.
Our poems are maybe love letters to God,
and the words we write each other seal our faith
forever bound in some most hold place –
a name so deep that names will disappear.
The paper still will smell of her perfume.
You will approach the moment of your death,
your epitaph a whisper in her voice
of what is lost and what more pure motion endures,
and into what most pure nothing it goes
and stays forever, locked in dresser drawers.
And you will go forever too.
Stranded there outside yourself, unraveled
in the purple flower dawn, trembling, everything
will be removed from you, and something new will rise
into the night above Wisconsin, and will spread
beyond the windows of these tiny rooms
and wider than is possible across
the miles and years and names of flesh –
a name so deep that names will disappear,
a star collapsing to expand forever out
into the neon pink of its becoming.
Sonnet: for her seventeenth birthday
It is the world that turned to find this day
again amid the detritus of time:
the tea bags left in empty cups
scattered in the autumn sun.
It turned upon itself to find you here
again yourself the detritus of years:
the tiny hands that held your love
or curled about a strand of hair.
So turn upon yourself to find again
the world the day has turned into your hand,
which held your love, and curl yourself
about whatever sunlight you can find
to share this bright transfiguring.
It turns upon the secret of your light.
Elegy: of her first lover
I keep remembering my broken nose,
and wonder what it must be like to lie
completely broken in a hospital
on sheets so clean and white it hurts
to think of it. I wonder if you taste
your own red blood like I did mine,
as if it were a sacrament,
and if you’ll make it through the night.
I keep thinking about this physical
phenomenon that echoes from itself
at the corner of Silverman and Hillsborough,
and how your soul, if it was separated
from your body, is drowning now inside my throat
at least a hundred miles from anything
I might have recognized of you and me.
What was it you were thinking when we spoke
that final time? Because for me, I could not
get past the fact that you were once the man
who punched my face when we were drunk, who held
me down, whose body covered mine;
and how it seemed like you were speaking
a foreign language through the telephone.
Of what was it you dreamed? A girl to love you
and a television set? An office with a view?
How many deaths must one man die?
How many deaths before the last?
How much it hurts.
The shades that rise and fall.
How strange the names, and how they disappear.
