Some nights, worry quiets enough so I think I can follow again
the music that blooms in the dark, though the leaves have started
falling. It wasn’t this way last year, or the year before last and the year
before that, when we were like iron filings— crazed on a flimsy
sheet of paper, magnetized into storm by every wild shift in the pattern.
Though we unmask our faces now, those forces haven’t weakened:
fear of our coming deaths, fear of annihilation by fire or water or war.
For months, I denied even the body’s need for pleasure and
release. Stranded on a dreamless shore, I closed my eyes and begged
the simple claims of sleep until morning latched on again like a fever.
When everything turns so fast I want to lie my bewilderment down in a field
where the grass is rippling rather than trembling; to smooth my surging pulse
against the earth-notched body of a cello. How much has changed? It feels
as though I’ve crawled into a space at the center of the still-unfolding.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
