Arguments with destiny: 2

“…you, who forever elude me” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

You will deny it, but the same bird echoes
through us mornings and evenings; and in the sultry
afternoons when pigeons and stray dogs scratch
the untranslatable into the hard baked mud

of the square. I can name so many things
that come to have the shape they have
by virtue of sheer repetition. The heart builds
one ring upon another; and the peeled-back bark’s

already healing even as the white sap
spirals down a groove into the waiting tin.
To live in the eloquent gaps of contradiction
which spurn and enchant at every turn: how

is one to survive? A voice calls,
and the body turns: its learned habits
of obligation. The body twitches each night,
before dropping into the ravine of sleep.

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