Yield

This entry is part 53 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

“…turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:”

~ Octavio Paz, “Sun Stone”

 

Tear at the wood of the dead cherry
all you want, my little frenzied ones.
Tear at the bark of linden too,
reduce to rot the peeling wood
in the neighbor’s gazebo; flay the ivy
to pieces, sunder the jasmine from
its vine. More things than these
are inexorable, more hungers sharpen
their tongues than the points
of those fledgling spears. What is it
that you want? What are you looking for?
The wind loves all surfaces, not just mine.
But we take down the deck chairs anyway,
we fold the beach umbrellas, we board up
the windows against the coming storm.
How did it come to be that resistance
is in such gestures, and not in the willow
bending its crystal leaflets to the water,
not in the bird that petrifies the forest
with its singing
? The wind, yes, the wind:
it is the song in a burning building, the sidle
of a sigh along the throat because I held
the sound of your name too long under
a skim of water. I give it up to the air
again now, I turn my palms upwards as I
should have done. What else is there to do?

~ & with thanks to Lila Shahani for the Octavio Paz reminder

 

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Series Navigation← Landscape, with Summer BonfiresFire-stealer →

One Reply to “Yield”

  1. A DEATH IN EDEN

    What is he looking for? Why does he want?
    It is the unfinished in him that wants
    to be whole when there is something
    to build from: are there dreams there?
    How often do they come true? Do they?
    Or is he perhaps like the river course,
    streamed where water may over stones,
    debris, carcasses, and carrion of the dead,
    forever moving to the mouth of the sea
    always arriving where it will never return.
    Why does he want to return where he
    cannot? The dirt of his tomb is real enough.
    What does he want beyond the hole where
    he will lie dead as dead can be? Her body.

    —Albert B. Casuga
    06-19-12

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